Tag: light of the world

Come and See: Light of the World

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Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, 
“I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness,
but will have the light of life.” 

So the Pharisees said to him, 
“You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true.” 

Jesus answered, 
“Even if I do bear witness about myself, my testimony is true,
for I know where I came from and where I am going,
but you do not know where I come from or where I am going. 
You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. 
Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true,
for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me. 
In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. 
I am the one who bears witness about myself,
and the Father who sent me bears witness about me.”  

They said to him therefore, “Where is your Father?”

Jesus answered, 
“You know neither me nor my Father. 
If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”  

These words he spoke in the treasury, as he taught in the temple; but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.
John 8:12-20

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen.
Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
~C.S. Lewis from “Is Theology Poetry?” given to the Oxford Socratic Club

I see your world in light that shines behind me,
Lit by a sun whose rays I cannot see,
The smallest gleam of light still seems to find me
Or find the child who’s hiding deep inside me.

I see your light reflected in the water,
Or kindled suddenly in someone’s eyes,
It shimmers through the living leaves of summer,
Or spills from silver veins in leaden skies,

It gathers in the candles at our vespers
It concentrates in tiny drops of dew
At times it sings for joy, at times it whispers,
But all the time it calls me back to you.

I follow you upstream through this dark night
My saviour, source, and spring, my life and light.
~Malcolm Guite “I am the Light of the World”

Those who do not yet share our faith can share our wonder at the beauty and comfort of light in the darkness, from the stars in the heavens to the candlelight at a service or over a shared meal.
~Malcolm Guite “The Light of the World is For Everyone”

Darkness is not where we will dwell forever.
We are hushed in fear and hungry for Light.
Jesus promises to feed us from Himself.

We are promised this in the Word:
and night will be no more.
They will need no light of lamp or sun,
for the Lord God will be their light…
Revelation 22:5.

Somewhere between the Word in the beginning
and the Word that becomes flesh
and the Word thriving as Spirit in our hearts and hands,
there is the sacred silent Light of God come to earth

a threshold of quiet stillness
as we stand poised to cross into the Light brought by His Word;
He is a flint struck to our wick
in our eagerness to abolish the Darkness
with the eternal glow of His illuminating Word.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

A Bright Sadness: The Light of the Body

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Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers

on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse

ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system—
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,

the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew

who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe

in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of
corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness

by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not
as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive,

correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown
dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching

out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and
nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy

me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind
soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see.

The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower
of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously

over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper?
Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.
~Gail Wronsky

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5: 14-16

Some days I am dreaming awake with wide-open eyes.  There is a slow motion quality to time as it flows from one hour to the next to the next, and I can only take it in, watching it happen.  Life becomes more vivid, as in a dream — the sounds of birds, the smell of the farm, the depth of the greens in the landscape, the taste of fresh plums, the intensity of every breath, the reason for being.

There is lightness in all things, as the Creator intended.

Yet much of the time is rush and blur like sleepwalking,  my eyes open but unseeing.  I stumble through life’s shadows, the path indiscernible, my future uncertain, my purpose illusive. I traverse heaviness and darkness, much of my own creation.

Wake me to dream of light some more.