Walking in the Light?
Did you know that it’s still Easter? It’s one of the wonderful things about the church calendar that the seasons last a lot longer than we think. We always think they are just one day a year, but in truth Easter is a season. It lasts seven weeks! Which means you can keep on eating chocolate bunnies, Cadbury eggs, peeps, and whatever else you can find on clearance at Wal-Mart. As Christians it is our duty to be witnesses to Easter, the cross and resurrection, and what better way to do that than to go and buy more chocolate and candy. Do it for Christ.
It is still Easter, and while you may or may not follow the well thought out instructions above, one thing that will happen is we will see the implications of Easter in the early church and in our lives today. Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave are world-altering events. They change everything. Absolutely everything. No matter where you are in life there really is no neutral ground when you consider what Christianity is actually claiming to have happened on the first Easter two thousand years ago. There are some facts that no one really disputes and those are that Jesus was a man who lived and taught in Israel two thousand years ago, he was baptized by John the Baptist, he was a figure of controversy, and he was crucified as a criminal under Roman prefect Pontius Pilate near Jerusalem. He lived, he was baptized, he caused a stir, and the Romans killed him. Those are the most widely accepted facts of the case. But the Christian faith obviously goes further. He was not just a man, but he was the Son of God who came for a very specific purpose. He came to atone for the sin of humanity, which explains his baptism and crucifixion, and it points to the most audacious claim of the Christian faith that after three days in the grave, he rose again. Jesus was resurrected. It is this central tenet of Christianity that refuses to allow any one to remain neutral when it comes to Jesus. His body was not found, nor has ever been produced. The tomb was empty.
The position that he was a good teacher that we respect and had great influence just does not fly. A person that holds that position on him has not really paid attention to what he said about himself or what the church has said about him for two millennia. They either have not paid attention or have simply chosen to ignore it. Anglican author C.S. Lewis famously responded to this line of thought in some BBC radio talks that were later put into his classic book Mere Christianity. He said,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.”
As Lewis said, Jesus has not left the option of being neutral about him open to us. He was either a lunatic, a liar, or in fact the Lord, and even though Lewis does not mention the resurrection here he surely had it in view because he was referring to all that Jesus taught, and Jesus referred to his death and resurrection multiple times throughout the Gospels. His resurrection is the hinge upon which the Christian church hangs. It is what every single person must come to grips with at some point, either for it or against it.
When we look at 1 John 1-2:2 we see him picking up on this very thing. John is writing to the church in Asia Minor, exactly where is up for debate, but it is clear that John is writing to one of the communities that he had been a part of. Similar things were happening in this church that were happening in the church in Corinth. There was a split that had occurred in the fellowship over the facts of who Jesus was and what he did. And among the debated topics was of course the resurrection. The group that had split off of the congregation was clearly calling into question the truth of the resurrection. They doubted just like Thomas. Thomas heard the other disciples say they had seen the resurrected Jesus, but said, “Unless I put my finger in the mark in his hands and put my hand in his side I will not believe” (John 20:25). Thomas wanted proof, physical tangible proof. And as John tells us in his Gospel he got it.
John, being the author of the same Gospel that recorded the interaction between Thomas and Jesus, employed the same tactic in his letter here. He opens his letter very similarly to his Gospel by being painfully clear about whom Jesus is. He says, “That which was from the beginning…” Mirroring his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” He wants his readers to be very clear that he is talking about Jesus, and Jesus is the same creator God found in Genesis. In the beginning… He’s not just a man, but the Lord of the universe. Then he says, “[that] which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands.” He counters their doubt by recalling the thing that changed Thomas, the fact that he and many others were witnesses of the physical resurrected Lord. “We heard him speak to us, we saw with our own eyes, and we touched him with our own hands. We touched him! He was not a ghost; he was not a figment of our imagination. He was physical and tangible. He was really alive. I was there.” That’s what John reminds them of. He wants their response to be the same as Thomas’, “My Lord and my God,” so that their joy might be complete.
BUT while all of this is true, while Jesus and his resurrection are not something that allows for a kind of “meh” shoulder-shrug position, a neutral position, there is something else we all have to contend with and that is our own context. We are not as big on objective truth claims as we used to be as a culture. C.S. Lewis was writing in a time of modernity, when Truth with a big T still carried a lot of weight. His arguments are awesome and very convincing and yet one of the wonders of post-modernity and millennial thought is that we can sit here listen to what he says and still be like: “I don’t know. That’s all cool and all, but it doesn’t really seem to have any bearing on my life.” We only really care about the meta narrative when it intersects with our personal narrative. Otherwise we don’t trust it. We don’t like it. We care about truth when it becomes “our” truth, when we own it for ourselves, when it actually hits home for us. In that sense we are very much like Thomas. “Hey great guys. I’m so glad you all saw Jesus raised from the dead, but I won’t believe until I see it for myself.” It wasn’t real for Thomas yet. It’s something that I like to say a lot when it comes to truth especially in the world of recovery, “It doesn’t matter to you until it matters to you.” You won’t care about something being true until it meets you in your own place of need…until it matters to you. That’s when anything matters to anyone, when it actually affects us.
A few years back, John Oliver had a segment on his HBO show called Last Week Tonight in which he discussed the breaches of privacy by the NSA as revealed by Edward Snowden. He was alerting his audience to the fact that the controversial patriot act, which allows the NSA to do such domestic spying, was up for renewal that year. Oliver actually went to Moscow and interviewed Snowden and exposed to Snowden that no one in America really cared about what the NSA was doing or even understood it. He showed him clips of pedestrians in NYC describing what they thought Snowden had revealed by releasing his classified NSA info. They all got it wrong and didn’t seem too worried about it to Snowden’s surprise. Then Oliver changed tactics. He told Snowden that if he wanted Americans to care about what the NSA was doing he had to put it into terms that they would understand. He then showed clips asking the same pedestrians about how they would feel if the NSA was able to see and steal any photos they had taken of their private parts. To which every single person said they thought that would be wrong and they would strongly object to such surveillance. Who cares about their rights and phone calls and such, but if they can see the photos I sent to my girlfriend of that is not cool! One of the guys interviewed confessed he had sent such a picture to his girlfriend the day before! So as I say, it doesn’t matter to you until it matters to you.
One of the great things about the meta narrative, and truth for that matter, is that it is by definition universal. It eventually will affect your personal narrative if it indeed is true. It will matter to you at some point simply because it matters. And here we find John taking the larger truth of Jesus’ death and resurrection and applying it to our personal lives. He brings it all down to where the rubber meets the road for us. He reveals the biggest implication of the resurrection in our everyday lives and that has to do with sin and forgiveness, it has to do precisely with our pain, with our brokenness.
John very beautifully employs familiar language when talking about truth, God, and us. He puts it into terms of light and darkness. “God is light, and in him there is no darkness.” He proceeds to talk about what it means to walk in the light as opposed to walking in the darkness. Very often this passage is taken as simply an argument for letting your actions match your words, “If you’re gonna talk the talk, then you gotta walk the walk” type thinking. In fact many commentators keep it right there that this is a passage that argues for faith in action. While I certainly agree that faith will result in action, after all our actions are simply the result of the condition of our hearts, and if Christ changes your heart, the root of who you are, then out of your heart will come good actions. The good root bears good fruit. So certainly we can agree that actions are the natural result of faith. At the same time, there is much more going on here.
John is showing us what it actually means to walk in the light, and it is different from what most of us automatically think. If I tell you to walk in truth and walk in the light and so on, my bet is that you would instantly put it into terms of morality, just like our commentators want to do. You would begin to think of how you should stop doing wrong things and start doing right things, in other words stop sinning. To walk in the darkness means to sin. To walk in the light means to not sin. That’s what we think with our cursory read of this section, but all that betrays to me is our predisposition to the law-based thinking. We read everything through the lens of perfectionism, aka the law. We think if God is light, and I want to be with God, I have to walk in the light, and the light means being perfect. The plain truth of the matter is that this is exactly right. That is exactly how it works under the law. But to boil this passage down to that misses the very big goal of John with this letter…and that is as we have said to talk about who Jesus is and what he did, the implications of Easter. Jesus is the point of contention in this community. There is disagreement over his significance and what any of his work on Easter actually means to us. John is not simply saying don’t sin, because God is perfect light, so too should you be. Far from it!
John is showing us what Jesus’ death and resurrection actually mean for us…the meta narrative intersecting with the personal narrative. In verse 6 he says, “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” And it begs the question what is it to walk in the darkness? Verses 8 and 10 answer the question, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” And, “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” Walking in the darkness does not simply mean sinning, it means denying that fact that we are sinners. You’re in the darkness when you lie to yourself and to others about the fact that you are a sinner. John is exploring the implications of Jesus for us here. He is showing us that under the law it used to be simply don’t sin, be perfect, that’s what it meant to walk in the light. That’s what righteousness was. Until Christ! Now we walk in the light of Christ, and as I said at the beginning, HE changes everything.
Under the law of perfection you only had one of two choices really, be perfect like God, or hide the fact that you were not. Under the light of the law we scatter like cockroaches for the shadows. We don’t want to be found out. We don’t want to be exposed in our sin. We don’t want to be exposed as the posers that we really are because we’re going to be condemned for it. That what’s life under the law ends up looking like for us. It’s just a gigantic charade where we are all trying to convince each other and ourselves that we have it together. We all want to be like Ricky Bobby where we “get up in the morning and we piss excellence,” but the truth is we do not. We’re more like the Ricky Bobby that delivers pizzas on a kid’s BMX bike. We’re like the city of Paris. We spend so much time building up the facades and then use all our energy to maintain them, but behind them we are very old, tired, crumbling buildings. Nothing against Paris, it’s one of my favorite places on earth.
But John is showing us that walking in the light has fundamentally changed because of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Walking in the light does not mean not sinning, that would be great, but telling people not to sin does not take seriously enough our problem with sin, our bondage to sin. Walking in the light means not hiding. Verses 7 and 9 say it. “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.” And, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Walking in the light means being open about our brokenness, about our sin. We don’t have to hide from it any more because it no longer has the power in our lives any more. The moment the stone rolled away that day and Jesus got up and walked out of that grave sin lost its ultimate control and power over us. As John says Jesus is our “propitiation.” Propitiation means that he has cleansed us from sin and he has satisfied the wrath of God against sin. He’s removed the sin and the condemnation. There is a new light in our lives now, and it is no longer condemning like that of the law, now it is merciful, it is gracious, it is loving, it is forgiving.
We make Jesus out to be a liar when we try to deal with our sin by hiding it, by denying it. We say to him and to the world around us that he didn’t have to die for us. His work on the cross and his resurrection from the dead were unnecessary. I’m not a sinner. I’m getting better everyday. With a little bit of elbow grease and some good old fashioned know how I can master this sin thing. OR I just try to say that sin is not sin. No, no, it’s not sinful. I can do it. It’s cool. And John is saying, “Bull Beep!!! That is B.S.! That is darkness. That is lying. That is deception. You’re lying to yourself, and you’re lying to everybody else.”
But that’s always what we do. If you try to say sin isn’t sin then you automatically undermine Jesus and his importance and the reverse is true too. If Jesus was just a good teacher or even an exceptional teacher, but he didn’t rise from the dead and he wasn’t the Son of God then you automatically undermine the gravity of sin. Either way it is darkness. BUT now because of Jesus we are free to be who we are. We are free to be vulnerable and open about our sin because as John says, his blood cleanses us from all sin, and he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Righteousness for us now looks like total dependence on Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection for us. And the impact on our personal narrative, why this matters to us, is that we can actually “skip the charades,” as the Cold War Kids sing. We can find acceptance and love for who we really are from ourselves and even from others because we first have found that acceptance in him. That’s the fruit that John talks about here: fellowship…fellowship with each other because of our fellowship with the Father and the Son Jesus Christ. We are free to be truly known, no more posing, no more lying, no more facades. It is a truth upon which every 12 Step recovery group is based that when sick people get together and simply admit to each other that they are sick, they get better. They don’t tell each other to be better, don’t sin; they tell each other that they are sick, and it makes all the difference in their lives. That’s the world we live in now; we live in a world of confession and forgiveness, a world of grace. That is what it means to walk in the light, the light of Christ.
And I’ll close with John’s own comforting words, “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.” Amen.
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