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.