WE RAVE LIGHT John M, Buchanan
John 9:1-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
March 5, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

Ernest Hemingway did much of his writing very near the edge of good theology,
In an intriguing short story, A Clear, WellrLighted Place, an elderly gentleman is
sitting alone in a cafe, which is - as the title suggested ~ clean and well-lighted,
It is late at night: two waiters are on duty, one a young man who is anxious to go
home to his wife and impatient for the old man to pack up and leave, The other is
an older man who tries to explain why the lonely customer remains, In fact, he
admits that he too Likes the cafe at night time and is not anxious to leave, He
says, "IT am of those who need a light for the night," ‘There is something cheerful
and inviting about the bright lights of the city, or the lights of our homes, or
the lights of the Broad Street Steeple, When we are deprived of light, the result
is a little depressing and sometimes dangerous,

Those sentiments, which we are experiencing first-hand in the winter of 1978,
have been felt by people since the beginning of time, The images of light and dark-
ness are a universal metaphor which turn up in nearly all the religions of the
world, On the one hand, evil, suffering, sin, the demonic, have been identified
with darkness, On the other hand, goodness, truth, freedom, God, have been identi-
fied with the light, The first act of creation in the Genesis story is the calling
into being of light: "And God said, 'Let there be light’ and there was light.,, and
God saw that the light was good,"

The great Christian poet of our century, the late T,S,Eliot, wrote,,,

"O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!

Too bright for mortal vision

QO Greater light, we praise Thee for the less;

The eastern light our spires touch at mourning.,

We thank thee for the Lights we have kindled,

The light of altar and sanctuary:

Small lights of those who meditate at midnight

And lights directed through the coloured panes of windows,,.
We see the light but see not whence it comes,

O Light Invisible, we giorify Thee!"

Light is a rich and suggestive symbol, When, on Christmas Eve, we want to
celebrate the birth of Jesus in a special way, we Light small candles and the dark-
ness of this Sanctuary is slowly pushed back and we sit finally for a moment in a
magic brilliance, and the truth of the occasion is expressed without saying a word,
Likewise, at our Tenebrae Service, we will use the light of candles in a dark
Sancteary;: this time extinguishing the light as we follow our Lord to His cross,

The Fourth Gospel employs the symbol of Light to deseribe Jesus Christ, The
familiar words of the prologue set the scene: "In the beginning was the word.,.In
him was life and the life was the light of man. The Light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not overcome it," In the Fourth Gospel Jesus uses the metaphor
to describe himself - "I am the light of the world," Our text this morning, a
story about Jesus and a man born biind, is a commentary really in the assertion,

But first, let’s learn a little about the background, By the year 90 A.D,
it was apparent that if Christianity was going to survive it would have to learn
how to speak Greek, For several decades the strength of the new movement was

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located at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, But Paul had carried it into the
Greek-speaking cities of the Empire, and by 90 A,D, it was apparent that the new
movement was something more than a branch of Judaism, The three Gospels existent

at the time, Matthew, Mark and Luke, depend mainly on a reader's sense of Israelite
history, knowledge of the Law and prophets. By 90 A.D, there was a need for a Gospel
for people who knew nothing of Judaism, the richness of the Old Testament stories,
the traditions, the customs: people primarily comfortable with Greek thought, Greek
words, Greek ideas, The Fourth Gospel was written specifically to meet that need,

It was essential to teil the story of Jesus in words and concepts familiar
to the reader and for the Greeks that meant philosophy, They invented logic: they
valued the disciplined inteilect: Plato's "Philosopher-King" was the model of
highest humanity - a monarch who knew the truth, If you ever waded through Plato's
Republic in college philosophy you may remember the popular Allegory of the Cave,

In that story men are chained in a cave, able to see only their own shadows on the
wall in front of them, ‘They conclude that the shadows are reality, Then one day
they are released; the true Light burns their eyes: they see other objects and

become confused, Finally, they adjust and walk in the pure light of the sun, That,
Plato taught, is the process of pursuing truth, the noblest guest known to humankind,
Every Greek who could read knew that story, And every Greek believed that one of
the necessities of Life was to know the truth, One of their mathematicians, Archi-
medes, put it into a memorable sentence that remains true: "Give me a place to

stand and I will move the earth,"

The Fourth Gospel is an attempt to give a Christian answer to the fundamental
Greek question, "What is truth?" It does not pretend to be a marrative account of
the life of Jesus, In fact, it tells a significantly different story from the other
three accounts, Rather, it presents a series of signs involving Jesus, the intent
of which is to leave the reader astonished and asking the question, "Who is this man?”,
the answer to which is "He is the Light of the World - the Truth - this man Jesus."

The story about which we are concerned this morning is a familiar one, We
read the first sequence of events as our New Testament lesson, but the story really
must be heard in its entirety.

Jesus encountered a man who had been olind since birth, After rejecting the
disciples' sugrestion that the blindness was a result of someone's sin, an orthodox
Jewish idea at the time, He made a paste from his own spittle and smeared it on the
man's eyes, Just how Greek this story is, is indicated by the fact that the Rabbis
had declared that it was illegal to use saliva in religious ceremony. In any event
He sent the man to a pool to wash and when he returned he could see, The important
part of the story follows next, First his reighbors express their suspicion: "Isn't
this the blind besgar?" they ask, They bring the man to the Pharisees who are very
interested in what happened, The man tells his story and the Pharisees object
because the Sabbath law has been broken, Then the Pharisees summon his parents,
trying to find out if their son really was blind, Finally, they confront the man
one more time: "Speak the truth," they command - the author is still addressing the
Greek mind - and the man says, "All I know is that once I was blind, and now f
can see," Finally, Jesus catches up with him and the man confesses his faith,
Notice that as the story proceeds, the religious authorities move further away
from the truth as the blind man gets closer: in the end they are the blind ones
and he is the one who can see,

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Where in that is God's word for us? This is not the age of phiLosophy, In
fact, if you want to bring to a screeching halt the conversation at a party some
time, wait for a lull and then say, “I've been wondering Lately, what is truth?"
Our model of ultimate humanity is a very long way from Plato's "Philosopher King",
We prefer scientific knowledge to wisdom, expedience to truth, pragmatism to good-
ness, Machiavelli said it several centuries aga and former President Nixon's
cronies practiced it: "What's good is what works," And yet, even if it is an empty
space, there is a place deep inside every human being where truth is defined; where
beauty and goodness take shape, Deep inside, each of us has a philosophy - or at
least, a place for one,

The psychologists tell us that truth is first imposed on us by parents, They
tell us what is true: they communicate the operative values and standards and we
accept, 'This is good - that is bad: this is true - that is false," It's a very
comfortable arrangement for a dozen years or so until the legendary trauma called
adolescense, the essence of which is to question, rebel against, and reject all the
truth so carefully imposed by parents, When you are on the parenting side of it, it
sometimes feels Like an assault by an alien force, We fight back: we know what is
true and right and good, and we find ourselves thinking and sometines saying, “Why
do you - at the ripe old age of fourteen - think you know all the answers?" At our
best and most enlightened, however, we know the absolute necessity of the process,
and rejoice in it, and bite our tonmues and pray for the time to pass quickly, The
purpose of it all, in God's wisdom, is for the person to arrive at definitions of
truth, goodness ~ a philosophy, if you will - that are personal and real and
authentic for that individual, Sometimes the old authorities are reclaimed, You
know the old story about the young man of twenty~one who wondered how his father,
after years of seeming dull and obsolete, had become so suddenly wise, Sometimes
parental truth is claimed: sometimes the church begins again to make some sense: and
the law and the educational system.

If we have a crisis of philosophy, however, it is precisely at this point,
Suddenly, there seem. to be no authorities: no handles to hold, Elton Trueblocd
Writes: "Many terms can be applied to our age, but one of the most accurate
affirmations is that ours hag become an age of confusion,in which people simply do
not know what to think, Technology has not brought utopia, the Great Society has
not emerged; peace is as elusive as ever; poverty still exists..." (A Place to
Stand, p.1l4).

The fact remains about all of us: we need a place to stand, To the graduat~
ing students of the College of Wooster, the late Howard Lowry said, "Beyond every~
thing else we would Like to know what is true,’ (College Talks, p.83). When all
the old authorities lose their power or integrity we look for new ones, new phil-
osophies, new religions, Zen, Buddhaism, Astrology - old ideas in new dress, Dr,
Walter Menninger, two weeks ago, cited what I thought was very significant data. A
recent psychiatric study indicates that the majority of young people who have be~
come involved in the strange, frinee religions are rather healthy, stable, self-
affirming, They have found a philosophy, a Light in the darkness - a place to stand,

The Fourth Gospel suggests that Jesus Christ himself is the Light of the
World; that in the place of a philosophic abstraction the truth is a Crucified Lord,
One of the abiding ironies, however, is that the religion which gathers itself
around this Lord almost inevitably assumes his mantle for itself, That was the
dilemma of the Pharisees - who could not see the true light, blinded as they were

~~ & ww

by their own religion, The more amrious we are, the more worried and afraid, the
more tightly we clutch at the mantle - of Presbyterianism, or Roman Catholicism, or
Methodism, Like Linus in the Charlie Brown cartoon ~ when the going gets tough
nothing takes the place of our security blanket. Sometimes religion itself claims
to be the Light of the World and plays directly into a very deep human need, We need
to know the truth: our egotism needs the assurance that we are on the side of the
right and those who disagree with us and threaten us are in the wrong, Dr. Eric
Berne taught us how seriously we play our vames of "Mine is Better than Yours": with
the tragic result that Christians who ought to be standing together in the light of
the world spend most of their energy trying to convince themselves that most, if not
all, of the light shines in their particular closet,

The late Paul Tillich was perhaps the finest philosophic theologian of the
century, Listen to his confession: "I say this to you as somebody who all his Life
has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ, But the more
one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have
learned from our teachers and from the teaching of the church in all generations, is
not the truth that makes us free, The church very early forgot the word of the
Gospel that He is the truth: and claimed that Her doctrines about Him were the
truth," (The New Being, p.70),

In the lansuage of philosophy, the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes a very
radical assertion, Truth - Goodness - Light - is not an idea, nor a philosophic
abstraction - not a creed or a theological system - but a Man. He is the Light
of the World,

X would submit that the anctent dialectic of Light and darkness continues to
have meaning, Students of history are not ordinarily very optimistic about the
prospects for the future, They tell us that most of the great civilizations have
emerged, flourished, decayed from within and disappeared, They point to the tragic
story of war, hatred, greed in every age and suggest that ours is no different,
Malcolm Muggeridge writes: "It has become abundantly clear in the second half of the
twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself, Having wearied
of the struggle to be himself, he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence,
his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own
strength,,,until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and
drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus,
and becomes extinct," (Jesus, p.33).

It is not a very happy picture, But the Gospel of Jesus Christ suggests that
there is light shining in the darkness of human history: that Jesus Christ and His
followers keep lighting brave candles rather than cursing the darkness, It has
happened in every age - hospitals, schools, equality, justice - look behind those
institutions and those ideas and you will very Likely discover a man or woman who
knew that there is light - and that its name ig Jesus Christ: that there is hope
because the darkness has not overcome the Light,

And more deeply still, within each one of us, there is a measure of darkness,
The Freudians frighten us by suggesting that within each of us is a hidden person,
a rather unsavory character at best. Our "shadow self" is what Carlisle Maxney
calls it: the self that wallows in guilt, that hates and hurts and resents: the self
that keeps score and battles every other person for supremacy: the self that puts
up 4 respectaBle front to masquerade the cynicism inside: the self that escapes on

~5-

occasion and ends up hurting people we want to love, and destroying what we want to
buiid up, St. Paul never heard of depth psychology put he had hold of a fundamental
truth about the human condition when he said, "I can will what is right, but I
cannot do it, For I do not do the good f want, but the evil I do not want is what
Ido, " (Romans, 7:18-19),

it takes a very honest and courageous dnd strong person to admit that, Part of
the truth is that there is darkness within each of us, but the larger truth, we dare
to believe is the Gospel of Jesus Christ - that here, even in the labyrinth of the
human soul, the light of the world will shine brightly,

The Fourth Gospel ~ particularly the account of the blind man, begins phil-
osophically but concludes evangelically and personally, We must finally come to
terms with this man whether our approach is philosophical or very, very simple. A
Christian is one for whom Jesus Christ has become the light of the world, the living
center of life, the arbiter and judge of all other truth, the very place to stand, And
finally, whatever our approach, we must make some decision about thig man, Whether
you use the "Born Again" vocabulary of the new evangelicals, or the more staid phrases
of traditional Presbyterianism, or the highest liturgical language of the mass makes
absolutely no difference at all, What matters - the only thing that matters - is
that you and I open our lives - even the darkest corners - and Let His light shine.
It doesn't matter how you do it - or how you describe it. What matters is that you
choose Jesus Christ as the Light of your world, Whether the form of it is an altar
call or the quiet privacy of a Presbyterian pew on Sunday morning makes no difference
at all. What matters is that you claim Jesus Christ as your Lord - your Savior -
your Light in whatever darkness you find yourself,

Maicolm Muggeridge, whom I quoted earlier, is an intellectual's intellectual,
former editor of Punch, salty and witty Britishman of letters, Several years ago he
became a Christian, I am moved by his testimony: iet me share it;

“Suddenly, almose with a click Like a film coming into sync,
everything has meaning, everything is real: and the meaning,
the reality, shine out in every shape and sound and movement,
in each and every manifestation of life, so that I want to
ery out with the blind man to whom Jesus restored his sight;
‘One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see,'
How, I asked myself, could I have missed it before? How not
have understood that the grey-silver light across the water,
the sea-gulls and the sweep of their wings, everything on
which my eyes rest and my ears hear, is telling me about
God," (Ibid p. 25),

Each of us knows what darkness is. Each of us participates in the confusion
and anxiety of our age, And in moments of courageous honesty - each of us has met
the darkness within, For us - even today - Jesus said: "I am the Light of the
World,” Amen,

Of God of light - dispel any darkness in our lives, Help us to see with
clarity and accuracy ~ ourselves - and others - but most of all the truth incarnate
in Your Son our Savior Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray,

Amen,