Walk in the Light

Read 1 John 1:3–10

John says, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (v. 5). God is pure light of a brilliance the human mind cannot imagine. Even the brightest stars and quasars cannot begin to challenge the brightness of God. It is no surprise that God’s first word of creation in Genesis 1:3 is, “Let there be light.” It is as though God has lent the universe some of God’s own essence to get things started.

John brings up God’s nature as light in order to set us humans in contrast. He writes, “If we say that we have fellowship with [God] while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true” (v. 6). To sin is to walk in darkness, and to walk in darkness is to shun the light. The gospel of John puts it this way: “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed” (John 3:19–20).

John, however, is not content to let this state of affairs persist. He says, “If we walk in the light as [God] … is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus [the] Son cleanses us from all sin” (v. 7). Did you catch that? The result of walking in the light is not only, as we might expect, that we will enjoy fellowship with God, but also that we will have fellowship with one another. When we are trapped in sin, we hide from God, true, but we also find ourselves alienated from our brothers and sisters. We discover the truth in Martin Luther King’s declaration that we “are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

This “inter-related structure of reality” binds us all together, whether we like it or not. As much as we would like to, we cannot distance ourselves from the bad actions of other people, either our contemporaries or those long dead. As I mentioned in my reflection last night, I have enslavers in my family tree. I have never enslaved anyone, but the legacy of that evil continues to affect me just as surely as it does the descendants of those who were enslaved. I have not sold weapons to any agents of the Israeli Defense Forces, but my tax dollars have been used to pay for the weapons that are now being used in Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the people of Gaza. I’m not a huge polluter, but I live in a country with a supermassive carbon footprint, so global climate change has to be an issue for me just as much as it is for those who live in low-lying areas such as Bangladesh or the Maldives. It’s a single garment of destiny we’re wrapped in.

John’s solution is confession, just as it was Joel’s solution in our Ash Wednesday worship service last night. John writes, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (v. 9). We will be restored to a right relationship with God and right relationships with our fellow children of God.

So let us walk in the light this Lenten season. Confession, they say, is good for the soul. It’s also good for the body politic, the state of the church, and the planet where we all make our home.

Grace and peace,
bob