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We’ve spent the fall unpacking the Beatitudes in Sunday Express. In a dualistic world obsessed with who is in and who is out, governed by skepticism and a need for everything to be tangible, touchable, physical and possessable, Jesus, the Christ took every expectation and traditional belief about being blessed and turned it upside down. Jesus preached about God’s inclusive kingdom where God blesses those who may seem powerless and challenges us to descend the mountain with a reality of abundance to cure a mentality of scarcity with love and justice. As he concludes the Sermon on the Mount he reminds us that we are the light of the world.
In today’s Scripture lesson from John, Jesus finds himself speaking in the shadow of Moses’ commandments in the midst of an ego driven effort to find solution in human commandments.
Jesus’ response to the Pharisee is wonderfully subversive and directed by inner knowing. Because his surety is not built on human commandments, his truth is simply his truth. Love is love. Everyone and everything deserves our respect, our reverence, our sense of their dignity, because they contain the divine -- they possess that very same light and inner knowing that Jesus extends to us at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
The funny thing about light is that it illuminates everything while light itself is intangible. Fr. Richard Rohr reminds us insightfully, "Remember, light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else."
I’d like to hazard that Jesus' inner light is one of love - courageous, fierce, vulnerable, empathetic love. As we do on Christmas Eve, may the Light of Christ grow from one single candle to a sea of lights illuminating the darkness with love.
God who is with us, God who goes before us and God for whom there are no surprises, we thank you for being the Light of the World. We thank you for bestowing that Divine Light within each of us. May we see through and live in Divine Light all our days. Amen.