Light dispels Darkness

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night

Reflection at morning worship for the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 13the February 2024

Sometimes, the human world seems so full of hatred, and so empty of love, doesn’t it! If we turn on the news, read a newspaper, flip through social media, we are assaulted by images of frustration and anger, meanness and cruelty, death and destruction. Terrorist attacks, bombardment of civilians, schools and hospitals, anti-immigrant and racist chants, arson attacks on places of refuge. We must name all this hatred in the world for what it is, wholesale evil and sin, at a different level to the retail sin of our individual failures to be the people God wants us to be.

In today’s reading (1 John 2:1-11) St John calls on us as individual Christians to reject such hateful sin and open ourselves to the love of God.

He begins by reminding us that we who call ourselves Christians are not immune from sin. We can seek and find forgiveness through Jesus Christ, not just for ourselves but for the whole world, on one condition. The condition is that we obey Christ’s commandments.

What are these commandments? Jesus has summarised them for us in words we hear at every communion service: ‘You shall love the Lord your God’, and ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’. And he teaches us that every person is our neighbour, even those we find difficult or do not like. These are the commandments that Jesus lived by in his life on earth. And if we are to live in God’s loving forgiveness, then we must imitate him by doing our best to live up to them in our own lives, ‘to walk just as he walked’, in John’s words.

John goes on to talk about light and darkness. Light, of course, stands for goodness, truth, beauty, and all that radiates from the love of God. It dispels darkness, evil, lies, ugliness, and all that conceals the love of God. Do not be deceived by appearances, he tells us, ‘The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining’.

At the Last Supper, Jesus gives his disciples a new commandment (John 13:34-38), ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.’

John points out this ‘new commandment’ is not really new at all. It is implied by the ‘old commandment’ to love your neighbour. But Jesus is impressing on his disciples, and so on all who call themselves Christians, that we are under a special obligation to love one another. John urges us as Christians to love one another and walk in the light of the true love of God, however difficult we may find it. The alternative is to stumble around in darkness in a world filled with hatred.

We must live in faith and trust that love will overcome the hatred we see in the human world about us, just as light dispels darkness.