light in all darkness

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, WINTON

FIFTH SUNDAY of EASTER (May 15th) 2022

 READINGS:

Acts 11: 1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21: 1-6

John 13: 31-35

The more I encounter the gospels the more I am in awe of the remarkable authors, human like you and me, who so skilfully wove together the all but inexpressible Jesus story. I am as you would guess, not one for believing that these scriptures were dictated by an angel from on high, but believe they are the work of ordinary human beings, like you and me, stumbling on the journey that came to be known as the way of Jesus Christ. Ordinary human beings, but possessing, as the author of Psalm 45 puts it, with “the pen of a ready writer,” and enflamed by the inexpressible joy of the writer of Psalm 148. So write they did, with God-breathed skill.

The author of the fourth gospel was one such. His scenes are in some ways so carefully crafted that it does them violence to divide them into segments for lectionary-based liturgical reading. But few of us have the concentration or retention to absorb John’s nearly 19,000 words (in English) of Jesus-story. So we have to take slices. And in this slice – “pericope,” the scholars call these slices – we enter the narrative just after one of the most dramatic sentences of the New Testament. In Greek “ehn de nux,” it was dark. If we were directing a film we would use the technique known as fade, or even cut, to black. 

If we have been reading or listening to John we would know by this point that “light” is one of the author’s great themes in the first half of John’s gospel-story. By now we would have heard the word 19 times. Most powerfully, we hear it in the opening chapter, the Prologue:

Nothing was made without the Word, everything that was created received its life from him, and his life gave light to everyone. The light keeps shining in the dark, and the darkness has never put it out. God sent a man named John, who came to tell about the light and to lead all people to have faith. John wasn't that light. He came only to tell about the light. The true light that shines on everyone was coming into the world.

In Greek or in good English translations the word “light” appears seven times in those verses, out of a total nine times in John’s gospel-account. Yet when we pick up the story, we learn – or should have learned if we heard that previous verse – that it was dark. Not “night,” so much, but “dark.” We are tempted perhaps with Dylan Thomas to rage against the dying of the light, except that, while some fire in our bellies does no harm, John dared to tell us that the darkness cannot win, that Christlight is inextinguishable. No matter what happens.

Scholars often tell us that all that we need to hear in John’s gospel account is revealed in the Prologue, the first eighteen verses of Chapter One. And at John 1:5, we have our clue: “the light keeps shining in the dark, and the dark has not overcome it.” In 1 John this theme is accentuated even more, over and again.It was a universal experience of the first Christian writers: love and life and light win, even when it seems otherwise.

Now let me confess, I sometimes if not often find this hard to believe. As I watch news from Ukraine, or as I read of growing suicide statistics from the youth of our own country, or read of rising tides eating our foreshores or of the plastic sludge strangling our rivers and oceans, our awa and moana, of new viruses and a host of other threats, I wonder often if the darkness is overcoming the light, if not for us but for our descendants.

Some of that is undoubtedly because our news services are more effective, more potent than at any time in history. If we were alive at the time of the Black Death I suspect that may have been more powerfully terrifying even than the news that surrounds us today, certainly quarantined as we largely are in New Zealand. The Bubonic Plague – perhaps most chillingly portrayed in 14th century wood cuts – wiped out 33%, one in three, of the population of Europe. So far neither Putin nor Covid is as terrifying as that, and while anything could happen at any time in the history of humanity, let us hold to that, however apocalyptic things may seem right now. 

In any case things are far less apocalyptic for us so far than for fighters trapped in the Azovstal steelworks of Mariupol or those struggling for a meal on the streets of Sri Lanka or justice in Afghanistan. And even terror and death and the seeming absence of God do not overcome the light.

For says John, the darkness does not overcome the light. 

John (whoever, wherever he was) wasn’t writing in a comfortable armchair. Judas went out and it was dark, and the darkness did not, has not, will not overcome the light. Nor did the terrors by which early Christians were executed, like their Jewish siblings before and since them. “Now,” said Jesus, as darkness appeared to win, “is the moment, the hour, the eternity when the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.” Not yesterday when all was light and rosy, the yesterday of our youth or the yesterday before Satan, as the scriptures put it, entered Judas. 

Let us remember that Jesus washed the feet of Judas even after he decided to betray his Master. He did so because love wins. Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 

The glory of light shines and shimmers out, “like shook foil” as the poet Hopkins put it, and conquers all darkness. John recorded all this years later, because even after some decades of faith and persecution, the knowledge of the presence of the risen Christ, shining light into the deepest, impenetrable darkness and hope into deepest despair, was utterly and inescapably real.

May it be so for us and for all who we love and pray for.