The warmth of the Father, the light of the Son

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 8: 12-20) sees another of these enigmatic exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees. Again, Jesus was in the Temple. Again, we see Him wrestle in disputation with his enemies. Again, He makes bold claims - that He is the light of the world; that the Father who sent Him bears witness of him - and again, He meets with incomprehension. He cites the Jewish law according to which the testimony of two people is true. But His words are not comprehended, and His interlocutors want to know where the Father who sent Him is. The scene ends with Jesus continuing to teach in the treasury of the Temple, as yet unmolested further by the authorities. This truce will not last for long.

Jesus seems to move between two different modes of speaking in this scene. On the one hand, His words are transcendent and mysterious: what were people to think of His claim that He was the light of the world? What were people to think of His assertion that those who follow Him will not walk in darkness? At the other end of this gospel scene, we find Jesus at his most rabbinical, engaging in a dispute with the Pharisees where He cites their law in order to underpin His own claims. In a sense, this latter part of the scene shows Jesus trying to meet the Pharisees ‘where they are at’, as we say these days. These men lived in a culture of legal disputation and argument; how were they to be led to the truth except through this kind of reasoning? Saint John gives us no indication of how persuasive the Pharisees found Jesus’ approach, other than that they disputed His words; we know some of them, like Nicodemus, had open hearts and minds, but we also know that others were intent on persecuting Him. More especially at this point, we do not know how Jesus’ more transcendent teachings were received. Nicodemus had struggled to understand Him when they had their meeting at night.

There are two other scenes in the gospel of Saint John that can reveal the inner meaning of this particular passage. The first is found in the opening of St. John's gospel, and it is worth quoting in full:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

We see now that when Jesus called Himself the light of the world in chapter 8, He was in the same moment calling Himself the life of the world. Why are these two metaphors bound so closely together? For the simple reason that the life that draws us towards itself must necessarily cast light on the path He wants us to walk. To share oneself, as God wishes to do with us, is to share the truth of oneself: to share who one really is. This is the light. Life – the whole process of living – is thereafter to become like the one who has loved us: be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Life is not meant to be a static museum display or a trophy cabinet to impress our neighbour; only our innate worldliness makes us think and behave in that way. Life rather is a journey, both for those of us who profess a belief in the light and for those of us who believe it is only fundamentally a meaningless game. For those of us who believe in the light, it is a journey in hope to the eternal home He offers us; for those who refuse His light, it is an as yet unfinished journey away from hope towards a definitive destiny of despair: abandon hope, all ye who enter here, as Dante puts over the gateway into the circles of Hell. As long as the journey is not over, there is still a chance of escaping the black hole of damnation which, unlike black holes in our universe, has no power over the light:

 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

If we turn from these transcendent openings of the scene to the last rabbinical disputation, we can also find further illumination in another part of St John’s gospel, most especially in the discourse after the Last Supper. Again, let us read this in full:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.

Jesus here explains to the apostles two mysteries: the first, which He affirms without further ado is that He is the Son of the Father. The idea that God has a Son was unknown to the Jews, although it is hinted at in several Old Testament scriptures. But even then, even when that idea is encompassed, there is another mystery to behold in their relationship:  I am in the Father and the Father is in me. The relationship, made in Chapter 8 into a rabbinical argument about two bearing witness, is seen here in its full beauty: the sonship of Jesus and the paternity of the Eternal Father are not like any son-father relationship; rather, they are like two dimensions of the same reality.

Light has two qualities: brightness and warmth: behold the light of the Son who illuminates every man coming into the world, and in that light the consubstantial warmth of the Father who offers through His Son’s death adoption into the reality of His family; both carried to us by the luminous Holy Spirit, communicating the warmth of the Father and the brightness of the Son through the radiation of His being. And this is why Jesus concludes his words to the Pharisees: If you knew me, you would know my Father also.

O weary, weary is the world

But here the world’s desire.

Throughout the terrible passion to come, this unity of Son and Father remains the transcendent mystery in the bloody awful pain, the eternal gift in the hours of suffering. To receive the warmth of the Father and to open our eyes to the light of the Son, all that remains for us to do now is to say our fiat in union with Him and with Mary, spouse of the Holy Spirit. 

Living for whose glory?

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30) sees Jesus apparently deciding not to go to Jerusalem for the feast of Tabernacles, but then to go in private. While He is there, He has a discussion with the people who wonder whether He is the Christ. Jesus responds to their concerns, saying that while they know Him, they do not know why He has come. In the end, even though the authorities wanted to arrest him, no one touched him because His hour had not yet come. If you struggle to connect with today's gospel, do not be surprised. The editors of the lectionary were rather too heavy-handed and took out some of its key ingredients. But let us set that aside to focus rather on what happens in this seventh chapter of the gospel of Saint John.

In the edited version of the gospel, we cannot see why Jesus apparently decided not to go to Jerusalem. But in the full version, His reasoning is very clear: My time is not yet here […] the world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. I think it was Fulton Sheen who first identified the religion of “nice”, the diplomatic fiction that because Jesus tells us not to judge, we are, therefore, under an obligation to think that everybody has good intentions. But the obligation not to judge concerns our view of a person's internal guilt or innocence before Almighty God. It is not an obligation to be naïve, or even worse, to behave as if every person we meet is not in fact a battlefield in one way or another. Even people who are apparently mature in all sorts of ways may have any number of private struggles that we are not the witness of. In a similar way, no matter the good elements in other denominations or religions, diminishment or denial of the truth is necessarily diminishment or denial of Christ who is the truth. It’s time to get over the ball and chain of naïve niceness, and to stop missing the wood for the trees.

But now we see the force of Jesus’ logic. There will be a time for Him to face the hatred of His persecutors, those who hate Him, but He intends to calculate carefully when that encounter comes. Discretion is the better part of valour. Fools rush in. We should not underestimate the disease of ill-will that broods more or less in the heart of every human being under the yoke of original sin. Why is Jesus hated? Simply because He threatens to stand between the world and what it desires. If we are in the divine will, then we are at peace, even if every war comes to our doorstep. If we are not in the divine will, if our wills are not reconciled with the ways of the Eternal Father, then we are not a peace, even if we cannot move for our friendships and peace treaties with the rest of the world. Fake peace and fake love are the sordid disguises of human self-deceit.

One question people ask about this chapter in the gospel of Saint John is whether Jesus lied. For He says that He will not go up to the festival because His time has not yet come, but then He goes. Jesus clearly intends to go, so why does He tell them He will not go? Some say this is an instance of Jesus making what moralists call a mental reservation; it is not a lie but a way of disguising what He is about to do from those who have no right to know. It is perfectly legitimate to do this with those who are persecuting us. As for changing His mind, why should Jesus avoid appearing to have changed His mind when He did not avoid the other burdens and limitations of the human condition?

There is one final mystery in the last section of the gospel which concerns why Jesus insists that He has not come of His own accord: He who sent me is true, and Him you do not know. I know Him and I come from Him and He sent me. It is not obvious on the face of it why this was such an important thing to say. Clearly, it caused consternation, for the gospel concludes by observing that the authorities were seeking to arrest Jesus. But what is the deeper reason for Jesus insisting that He has been sent, that He has a mission?

For that, we must go back to an earlier section of the chapter when Jesus brings before the crowd’s attention the point of conflict that lies in the heart of every human being. There, he says:

Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but He who seeks the glory of the one who sent Him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about Him.

The deeper reality of our lives is that everything is a gift, most especially our very being. We do not speak on our own. We do not live on our own or for ourselves. We have been sent from God and we are called to return to God. This is the meaning of our lives. A life that is fulfilled is one that is shaped by God's call and by God's sufficiency; true fulfilment cannot come from the things of this world, no matter how wonderful they are. The only true self-fulfilment is to find in God our purpose and our being and to enjoy all His gifts only insofar as they are a reflection of His love: whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory. If this is so, is it not the case that everyone who acts on their own, i.e. who acts to seek purely their own purposes and ends is committed only to themselves? The seductive language of self-realisation is actually a hymn to our own self frustration and loss.

In a way, realising this is the very purpose of the season of Lent: to hear again the words of the Lord spoken by the prophet Joel:

Yet even now, says the Lord,

    return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.

With all our heart… not leaving shards of it buried in the things of this world. In hearing this call, we make ourselves men and women of truth, like Jesus in this gospel scene. We conform ourselves to His mission and in some ways share in it because, as we know, we are called to live so that Jesus might live in us.

O Mary, teach us always to say yes to the Lord in every moment of our lives. O Mary, teach us always to speak and act not for our own personal glory but for the glory of the one who calls us.