Spirituality of the Readings

Let There Be Light

A single candle, placed in a darkened Winter window, will charm us. 

Picture it in your mind and then compare it to a room with powerful florescent lights. In the latter, every nook and cranny gets equal light, lots of it. There are no shades of grey. The wrinkles and imperfections of a human face want to run and hide because all their mess is made very obvious. 

Jesus is a great light after all. He is relief from the dark that we all walk in.

Now think of a room lit by several candles. Somehow the better parts of each face are brought out and the flaws are left kindly in the background. Such lights pardon our imperfections and grant us a kind of glow.

Jesus is that kind of light. Not a searchlight from which no flawed, fumbling thing can escape. He came as a simple candle, a forgiver of souls, a quiet lover of human faces.

There is a passage in the First Reading for Sunday that is quoted word for word in Sunday’s Gospel.

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.

Here, Jesus is a great light after all. He is relief from the dark that we all walk in. He is divine brilliance.

But the Gospel has him ambling along by the Sea of Galilee like an ordinary person. Strolling. How can this illustrious beam of light be dim, like the rest of us?

Some speculations: 

Maybe he is especially vital, the type that people are attracted to. Maybe he is someone you and I would automatically want to follow. After all, on Sunday we will hear about two sets of brothers who drop everything and go after him: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and then James and John—the sons of Zebedee, or “sons of thunder,” as Jesus will call them later. None of these men are fools. They would not follow just anyone. Jesus must have been a very appealing person.

So, did they see him as a “great light”? Did they somehow acknowledge that grave darkness would be dispelled by him? They probably had heard from the Baptist that Jesus was “The Messiah,” the one that the Jews had been awaiting for such a long time. 

Yet this Sunday we learn that Jesus’ light did not infringe on every precious cranny of people’s lives, as a searchlight might do. He was like a quiet glow, a candle in the window. His armies did not savage all in their path. His light was not a huge bolt of lightning. It was, impossibly, a quiet flicker that hurricane winds tried and tried to put out, but could not. Seen in this way, Christ’s light was indeed great, but in a new way, in an ordinary, diffused way. One that could suffer on our behalf.

Pope Benedict XVI put it like this:

God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes as a baby—defenseless and in need of our help. He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength. He takes away our fear of his greatness. He asks for our love: so he makes himself a child.

John Foley, SJ

**From Saint Louis University