LIGHT AND DARKNESS are powerful themes. They run throughout John's Gospel and the New Testament. But you can find them in all great literature and even in popular movies. The struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness is depicted in every kind of classic writing from ancient Greece to modern Hollywood.
We like to see ourselves as creatures of light. We want to imagine ourselves - if you've seen "The Lord Of The Rings" - in that last stunning scene before the Dark Gate standing with Gandalf all clothed in white encircled by countless multitudes of dark and hideous orcs. At last there is something to live for.
We are drawn to spectacles of the titanic clash between light and darkness in which we play a part. When we see the forces of truth and falsehood drawn so clearly and unambiguously for us we feel we have a better understanding of the universe.
But this is not the real world. In the real world, light and darkness, good and evil, are not so sharply defined. It is good, for example, to get rid of tyrants like Saddam Hussein, and despotic regimes like the Taliban. We feel a sense of pride when we see them fall. But we fail to tell ourselves the awkward truth that these evil men were created and kept in place for years by Western interests.
We find it satisfying to rid the world of terrorists, but at some deep level in our hearts we also know that we are partly responsible for spawning them. And we are usually encouraged to dismiss the thought. We find it easier to bomb than to heal.
The line between right and wrong doesn't run neatly between us and other people. The fact is, it runs within us all. The distinction between truth and falsehood isn't a line between our religion and their religions, between our nation and other nations. It's within all religions, and nations, and governments and political systems.
We are all a mass of contradictions, tempted to oversimplify right and wrong, to paint issues and people in black and white colours. But deep down we know the reality is more complicated.
Jesus made this point many times in his teaching. He once spoke of human moral character as like a field full of wheat and weeds, all mixed together. Any farmer knows that if you want the wheat to grow you have to leave the weeds in there. Only zealots and fools try to tear them out. Improve your own moral character, Jesus was saying, and leave everyone else's to God at the day of judgment.
Another time he asked "why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, and your sister's eye, and fail to notice the plank in your own eye? First remove the plank in your own eye, and only then presume to correct other people for their mistakes."
Jesus was not naive about the human condition. He was aware that we are capable of good and evil, and usually manage to do both. He seems not to have been a moral purist about people's sexual lives nor particularly impressed by religious idealism. He protected an adulterous woman from a religious execution by daring anyone in the crowd who was without sin to cast the first stone. He reserved his greatest criticism for the religiously self-righteous who placed impossible burdens on ordinary people.
Jesus appears to have thought that money was a far greater source of moral and spiritual corruption than sex, and in this respect today's moral purists have got things exactly the wrong way round.
It seems Jesus was loved by ordinary people precisely because he was less judgmental of human weakness than many of the religious leaders of his day. He seemed to recognise and understand our contradictoriness, the crazy inter-mixing of nobility and virtue and dismal failure in most of our lives.
He was not for sorting out the pure and the impure, at least not in this world, because he was wise in spiritual things. He knew that forgiveness goes much further than condemnation. Love is more powerful than moral zeal. He made room in his circle even for his betrayer, and he forgave his executioners at the moment of his death.
In John's Gospel when we read "the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it" we must be careful not to make this into another purity myth, another self-congratulatory legend.
In John's Gospel the whole world is darkness, and there is but one light. The wrong thing to do with this is to think we now have the light, and other people still dwell in darkness, but Jesus will not allow us to go there. He came to make his home among people who dwell in darkness, and that's all of us, not just some of us.
He is our light, says St. John, the light that lightens every person. The light that shines in you and me has but a single source, and that source is God. This light has come into the world's darkness, and it comes into your inner darkness and mine and makes its dwelling there.
We are not creatures of light, because there is much darkness in us, but we yearn for the light, and when we yearn for it deeply enough we reach out for God with all that is best in us. And God blesses us merely for the effort itself, the sheer act of trying, of wanting and seeking something better than we are.
In these moments of light that sometimes overtake us, we can - just for a moment - see the light in others. We can see the goodness, the beauty, the truthfulness that others reach out for beyond the evil and cruelty they commit all the while. When we see that light, we become a new person. We enter the realms of glory.
The great Muslim poet Rumi wrote: "We are all different lamps, but the light is the same." Light seeks light. The light in us recognizes the light in others, and in that moment of recognition we deepen our humanity and know something of the truth that is the only hope for the world.
This is the deep meaning of Christmas. The light of God has come into the world and shines in us still. Light is no one's possession. It is a gift to everyone. It is the light of compassion and wisdom, acceptance and trust, the radiance of God perfectly displayed in Jesus. May the world, and each of us, live more fully in this light.
+ Bishop Michael