A little light on the matter

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection is available here.

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In today’s gospel (John 3: 31-36), Jesus continues the conversation with Nicodemus which we have been listening to all week. It is not a long passage, and we need not delay long over the details. But it serves to bring out one of the themes that tend to be less evoked and which we have little inclination to reflect on: that the Light came into this world and the world received Him not.

These are words that haunted St John. They appear in any case in the opening of his gospel where the alignment of God, of His truth, and of the act of testimony, are made clear to the reader: the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

This clash of light and dark is not just a cosmic and global phenomenon, shaping our heavens and our horizons. Rather, it is the very story that unfolds in the life of every human, for again, as St John says: The true Light which enlightens every man was coming into the world.

Our God, the God from God and Light from Light, descends from His transcendent heights not to play with us, like some Greek divinity, but to live with us, to sup with us, converse with us like Nicodemus in the night, and to suffer and die along us, rising on the third day. This is how He enlightens us, and to those who receive Him, He gives the Spirit without measure. We do not reflect enough on this: the communication of the Spirit in such generosity, the riches that are ours at the price of opening our hearts to the Light.

But there is the other side of the drama too, a mystery of iniquity, that not everyone wills to receive this Light. We cannot presume on the state of anyone’s conscience, but we take too much our ease in believing that good will is universal, and everyone is good deep down. None are good in that simplistic sense; we are all a battlefield of good and evil, even the most sincere.

Mors et vita duello

Conflixere mirando.

Death and life are in a duel that astonishes us all, as the Sequence of Easter says. Salvation is not a walk in the park or a health spa for the rose-tinted optimists among us. Again, Jesus in today’s gospel:

Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on Him.

Triumph in this battle, however, does not come from our efforts. The weight is not on our shoulders, or it is but only insofar as we source all our strength and goodness in the one Saviour. And thus, the Easter Sequence, which echoes still in our hearts, concludes with the great Christian paradox:

Dux vitae mortuus

Regnat vivus.

The Leader of Life dies yet reigns and is alive.