"I Am the Light of the World"

These past weeks we have been walking through the Holy Gospel of St. John focusing mostly on the historical level of interpretation. Last week, we had progressed to Chapter 5 with Jesus visiting a temple to Aesclepius, the Graeco-Roman god of medicine. We considered that the world into which Jesus was born, having almost forgotten God, had deteriorated into syncretism, a fusion of many religions (or no religion) .... not so different from our situation today.

In the succeeding chapters, Jesus continues to evince His Identity as God. In Chapter 6 He acts boldly in the role of YHWH alone in the wilderness with His people, feeding them with manna by the thousands. He commands the winds and the sea, and they obey. He demonstrates to His Disciples that He is not subject to the laws of time and space but is rather their author and ruler:

But if the laws of nature bend instantly to His will, if the lower beasts at His Nativity instinctively know the scent of their Master, and if angels in Heaven bow in reverence at the sound His Name, such worshipful obedience has not been the case with His human creatures, who have resisted His will from the time of Eden. Lately, His disciples find that intimacy with God is too much for them. For they have become inured to a god who is aloof, who requires no more than nodding adherence to a collection of varied rules and the objective sacrifice of animals.

Chapters 7 and 8 are focused mainly on the controversy surrounding His Divine Identity, which the Twelve have manifestly embraced. Thus the dramatic tensions in St. John's Gospel are set. The basic premise of this most holy document is to ask the question: What would happen if our God, perfectly faithful, walked among His famously unfaithful people? More to the point, what did happen?

As we continue on His walk through the tribes of His historical people, we rejoin Him this morning. He stands near the Pool of Siloam. From the perspective of history, this stream and pool represent the striving of the Hebrew people to remain faithful, to remain pure. It was built by King Hezekiah during the seventh century B.C. through an underground tunnel in order to deny water to invading armies.

Yet, we know the sad history: how empire after empire — the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, the Persians, all worshipping Marduk — would transform Judah's culture, Judah's language, Judah's religion. This is the Judah which Jesus encounters at His birth, whose ruinous transformation has been especially dramatic on the eve of His Nativity.

We are farmers. We say that when we transplant something, as we did that ten-foot tall Tangerine tree Friday, we must expect that it will creep and then sleep and then leap. Judah-ism was transplanted from Babylon at the end of the Exile. At first it crept, being mostly confined to Jerusalem. After that it slept for centuries. Then, under the Hasmoneans, who whipped the people into a nationalistic fervor using Judah-ism as its instrument of unity, it leapt, right before the Nativity of Jesus .... that is, the Incarnation of God. A coincidence? In God's meaning-bearing world, there are no coincidences.

Still, standing beside Jesus we that the Pool of Siloam represents faithfulness to God. The pure waters had represented resistance to the pollutions related to Marduk. And that is its significance in our Gospel lesson this morning.

We know that the Semitic citizens of Judea were known for centuries as Judeans. But by the first century A.D., they were called Jews, 66 times in St. John's Gospel and each time said with a certain animus. The term signified, not "one who dwelt in historical Judah" (the term Judean serve that purpose), but "adherence to the Persian hybrid religion, Judah-ism."

Since the Maccabees, this religion had been forced on the people explaining the atmosphere of oppression which grips them. Even in our Gospel lesson we can detect this fear:

You can cut the tension here with a knife: parents put in the cruel position of choosing between their own welfare and the welfare of their (grown) child.

Today, we are apt to hear this threat as expulsion from a cherished place of worship. We who live in U.S. cities are familiar with modern synagogues, which are not very different in their appearance from most Protestant churches with their lines of pews facing a Bible and a pulpit. But the first-century synagogue, while it functioned as a place of prayer and Bible study, also functioned as a community center. The word synagogue in Greek means "to gather together." There is no religious connotation in the word. To "be put out of the synagogue" would be tantamount to separation from the community. And we know from the Gospels accounts, the perspectives offered when the community met were not always to the liking of the temple police.

Their son was born blind, these parents tell the authorities. From Jesus' perspective, his blindess from birth personifies first century Judah-ism. Clearly, he is a man of his times: blind to the changes in their culture and religion, blind to the alterations in their Scriptures, blind to God, Who stands right before them, though Jesus, plainly performs feats only God could do.

Jesus will set the scene carefully to emphasize the man's spiritual blindness:

And He pronounces these sentences in the Person of God: "I Am."

As He had with the multitudes in the wilderness feeding them with manna, He repeats the signature acts of God, this time reprising the Creation of man:

And He instructed the man to wash in the Pool of Siloam:

signifying, as I have said, the striving for faithfulness.

Now, St. John's note that Siloam is translated as "Sent" has been a puzzle which commentators generally pass over in silence. The Greek word underlying the English is simply a precise transliteration as befits a placename: Σιλωάμ / Siloám. It is, however, the Greek word underlying, not "Siloam," but "Sent" which should command our attention: Apestalménos, whose noun form is Apóstolos — literally, "one who is sent out." That is, St. John does not indicate that Siloam is translated as "Sent," but that the whole sentence is a "sending out." Our cue, of course, is the word "Go":

as in

As Jesus sends this healed blind man into the world, He has just reminded us that He too has been sent:

As He had in Shechem, Jesus makes a pilgrimage to a site that is sacred to the memory of the Patriarchs and to those who strived to be faithful to God. He sees there a man who will well serve His purposes:

And He does not simply heal Him, but He yet again reveals His Identity as God and sends him into the world as an apostle, "one who is sent."

The Pharisees speak more truly than they know when they tell the man born blind that he is Jesus' disciple (Jn 9:28).

We take our leave of the healed blind man by being privy to the moment of His conversion to Christ and (we infer) his commissioning as an apostle. St. John supplies one of Jesus' significant dialogues:

The lesson concludes with a rare statement concerning the nature of Jesus' apostolate:

He is the Light of the World. He shines His light upon true worship of God .... and false. As He did in Shechem, and does beside the Pool of Siloam, He raises up apostles as true worship of God is on the verge of descending into pagan night.

How many of us see Him, call Him Lord, and then fail to live a Christian life as they are clear to us when we are fervent in our prayers.

Things have been made clear to all around Him. Before them is plainly and boldly the very Person of the Living God, as Peter had lately attested. To worship Him, to share our lives with Him even down to the smallest, most intimate details, is life. All that remains, beside this, is night, which marks the end of all striving and all choosing.

Truly, we are in darkness, and (in our unredeemed state) we are bound for an overwhelming darkness, whose great power we cannot resist.

He is the Light the World. In the William Holman Hunt painting of that name, He stands in a ruined garden, overgrown with weeds. It is the garden, once filled with abundant light and splendid colors, the place of all our lost chances. And now night is falling.

He stands at the door and knocks. Do we realize that this door is the door of our own tomb? Our only and last hope is to open it and to be bathed once again in His gentle light. He has come that we might have life, and He waits upon each of us to the end.

Nonetheless, night comes. It comes with the power of demons flooding in when God is forgotten. It comes as a cruel and leveling wind, all-consuming as our perverted passions and as dark as our benighted souls. Night comes, and without Him none may resist.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.