Darkness and Light: Who Wins?

John 1: 1-5

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

 

            Feels like the first day of Creation.  There was darkness and God said, “Let there be light”, and there was.  While this verse draws from that imagery, it is metaphor.  There is another darkness and there is another light.  What do we know about the light?  We know that the light of all people was the life that came into being in Jesus. 

            The light of all people came in the creation of Adam and Eve.  They were to be the parents of all humanity in right relationship with God.  The light should have been all over us.  But then came the Fall of Humanity.  Original Sin.  Disobedience to God.  Darkness was introduced into the light of all people.

            Understand that John is one entire story, beginning to end.  The death and resurrection of Jesus were accomplished so that the light, the life, shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  So humanity messed up in the Garden, they got booted, and things got rather rough.  But we were never without hope.  The darkness is the darkening of the light of God in our lives because of sin.  Yet that beacon, that light, it shines on and the darkness did not overcome it.

            Adam and Eve fell, latter part of Genesis 2 into Genesis 3.  There are curses put in place against humanity by God for what we did.  But even in those curses, there is hope, there is looking forward.  There is a Plan.  And John is writing down the record of that plan.

Assumption:

It occurred to me last night to ask the question, “If the gospel writer wants us to make all these leaps and connections, why didn’t John make them obvious?”  That goes to the question of why the gospels became written documents in the first place.  Our best guess is that these started as oral traditions, the apostles themselves sharing the stories of Jesus to the gathered people.

            But then two things happened.  The first is that the church began to expand well beyond the people who knew Jesus personally.  Acts says there was a hundred and twenty or so “in the church” at Pentecost.  After that, it grew exponentially.  The second thing that happened is that Jesus did not return in the living memory of the first generation of apostles.  They began to die and, with them, the ‘authority’ of the eyewitness died.  So these things were written down.  It keeps the story straight as Jesus’ church expands and it keeps the story right as the witnesses moved on to be with our Lord once again.

            What that means for the study of John is that we are uncovering what presuppositions that John makes about what his audience already knows.  What does he have to make explicit?  What can he assume they already know?  How much they knew is different from how much we know. 

            So, in the community of faith, the Gospel of John is a document with authority, and we are digging into what it means.  For those of us in the faith, it deepens our understanding of the incredible vista of what God has revealed.  For those of us who are new to the faith, it invites us into the joyful work that God has accomplished for our redemption through Jesus.

Pastor Peter