WALK IN THE LIGHT: LESSONS FROM ST. JOHN (PART 1)
“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 St. John 1:5-7).
The Christian faith teaches us that to have eternal life we must enter into friendship with God. But if we pause for a moment to consider this with new eyes, we find ourselves with a daunting prospect. If we commit seriously to an idea of God, it quickly becomes clear that He must be an unimaginably powerful being unimaginably beyond our ability to comprehend. This being would have to be something other than all that we know and can grasp--He must be the ultimate other. Between the uncreated Creator of all things and the created beings that we are, what friendship can possibly be enjoyed? The reality of God is too great a thought for our minds to contain, individually or collectively. How then can we have friendship?
We can easily comprehend subservience, a flat obedience to this superpower. There would be no resistance. All notion of free-will and autonomy would surely evaporate as we were instantly compelled and chained to His will. We can imagine a kind of terror at the presence this God must bring everywhere, baffling as He does the basic pillars of all that we know in time and space.
His drawing near would threaten to undo us for its sheer immensity and intensity. He would be so full, so real that in the comparison of proximity all that we are would be shaken to the very atoms by the gravity of His presence. His light would be more substantial than the densest metal of our making. It would shine through concrete, it would burn its way through the most hidden things. Nothing would remain hidden before it. All that is in Nature would be revealed down to its most infinitesimal particle and to the barest whisper of its innermost soul. The true center of all that we are would be bare before it. The light of God, considered by itself, would mean an utter unveiling of every thought, word, deed, secret, shame, and ambition, of every wound, sorrow, trauma and sin, of every hope, love, and dearly held memory.
This would be God. He is the One in the middle of this radiant cloud of light. And yet it is into this light we must go if we are to become His friends and live. This begins with the gift of divine hospitality, a welcome bid to come into the light of God under the protection of God. It echoes the hospitality of a house toward the stranger in welcoming them in, washing them of the dust of their journey, nourishing them into strength, and then sharing hearth fellowship with them in an exchange of goodwill and gratitude. Seen this way we come to know that God does not welcome us in ignorance of our sin or brokenness, but rather welcomes us so that these things may be healed. And so, while those who walk in the light of God may still sin, they do not seek to hide from God when they do. To sin is not to depart from the light of God, but to turn toward the darkness. What takes us from light to darkness is to persist in hiding from God. But as long as we remain open and honest with God, then we experience the gift of friendship with God, which is the removal of the shame and fear and brokenness of our sin.
The light of God is the place we must be to know what we really are and to be able to bear the truth of what we are. We cannot look too far into our own fallenness without it driving us insane, unless we are assisted by the light of God that both sees and knows but also purifies and heals. To be brought from darkness to light, to enter into the friendship offered to us through Jesus, is to overcome the most critical division at the core of who we are. Once this division is healed, there is no other division that is greater. All can be made well.
The light of God is the truest connection between the faithful. We participate in God in whom and through whom all others of the light participate. It is this fact which secures eternally the friendship of all the saints. This union is manifested in the atonement of Jesus, by whose blood our fellowship with God has been won. Wherever Jesus is, that is where eternal fellowship with God and with each other is found. And so if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with God and one another through the union purchased by the sacrificial love of Jesus. This is where we are fully known and fully loved, both are essential for either to be possible.