The Light of the World, and Other Sermons

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the Light of the World: he that followeth me shall not walk in Darkness, but shall have the Light of Life. — JOHN viii. 12.

SOMETIMES Jesus gathers His work and nature up in one descriptive word, and offers it, as it were out of a wide-open hand, complete to His disciples. In such a word all the details of His relation to the soul and to the world are comprehensively included. As the disciple listens and receives it, he feels all his fragmentary and scattered experiences drawing together and rounding into unity. As, having heard it, he carries it forth with him into his life, he finds all future experiences claiming their places within it, and getting their meaning from it. Such words of Jesus are like spheres of crystal into which the world is gathered, and where the ast and future, the small and great, may all be read.

It seems to me as if there were days on which we wanted to set one of these comprehensive words of Christ before our eyes and study it. There are days when we must give ourselves to some particular detail of Christian truth or conduct. There are other days when we are faced by the question of the whole meaning of the Christian faith and its relation to the great world of life. Vague and perplexed the soul is to which its faith does not come with distinct and special touches, pressing directly on every movement of its life. But poor and petty is the soul which has no large conception of its faith, always abiding around and enfolding its details and giving them the dignity and unity they need.

One of these comprehensive words of Jesus is our text this morning.

I want to ask you then to think with me what Jesus means when He declares Himself to be the “Light of the World” or the “Light of Life.” The words come down to us out of the old Hebrew temple where He spoke them first. They pierce into the centre of our modern life. Nay, they have done much to make our modern life, and to make it different from the old Hebrew temple where they were spoken first. It will be good indeed if we can feel something of the power that is in them, and understand how clear is the conception of Life which they include, how far our present Christianity is an embodiment of that conception, how far it fails of it, how certain it is in being ever truer and truer to that conception that the faith of Christ must come to be the Master of the soul and of the world.

We may begin, then, by considering what would be the idea of Christ and His relation to the world which we should get if this were all we knew of Him, — if He as yet had told us nothing of Himself but what is wrapped up in these rich and simple words, “I am the Light of the World,” “I am the Light of Life.” They send us instantly abroad into the world of Nature. They set us on the hill-top watching the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They show us the great plain flooded and beaten and quivering with the noon-day sun. They hush and elevate us with the mystery and sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening’s glow. There could be no image so abundant in its meaning; no fact plucked from the world of Nature could have such vast variety of truth to tell; and yet one meaning shines out from the depth of the figure and irradiates all its messages. They all are true by its truth. What is that meaning? It is the essential richness and possibility of the world and its essential belonging to the sun. Light may be great and glorious in itself. The sun may be tumultuous with fiery splendor; the atmosphere may roll in billows of glory for its million miles; but light as related to earth has its significance in the earth’s possibilities. The sun, as the world’s sun, is nothing without the world, on which it shines, and whose essential character and glory it displays.

Do you see what I mean? When the sun rose this morning it found the world here. It did not make the world. It did not fling forth on its earliest ray this solid globe, which was not and would not have been but for the sun’s rising. What did it do? It found the world in darkness, torpid and heavy and asleep; with powers all wrapped up in sluggishness; with life that was hardly better or more alive than death. The sun found this great sleeping world and woke it. It bade it be itself. It quickened <i cry slow and sluggish faculty. It called to the dull streams, and said, “Be quick;” to the dull birds and bade them sing; to the dull fields and made them grow; to the dull men and bade them talk arid think and work. It flashed electric invitation to the whole mass of sleeping power which really was the world, and summoned it to action. It did not make the world. It did not sweep a dead world off and set a live world in its place. It did not start another set of processes unlike those which had been sluggishly moving in the darkness, It poured strength into the essential processes which belonged to the very nature of the earth which it illuminated. It glorified, intensified, fulfilled the earth; so that with the sun’s work incomplete, with part of the earth illuminated and the rest lying in the darkness still, we can most easily conceive of the dark region looking in its half-life drowsily over to the region which was flooded with light, and saying, “There, there is the true earth! That is the real planet. In light and not in darkness the earth truly is itself.”

That is the Parable of the Light. And now it seems to me to be of all importance to remember and assert all that to be distinctly a true parable of Christ. He says it is: “I am the Light of the World.” A thousand things that means. A thousand subtle, mystic miracles of deep and intricate relationship between Christ and humanity must be enfolded in those words; but over and behind and within all other meanings, it means this, — the essential richness and possibility of humanity and its essential belonging to Divinity. Christ is unspeakably great and glorious in Himself. The glory which He had with His Father “before the world was,” of that we can only meditate and wonder; but the glory which He has had since the world was, the glory which He has had in relation to the world, is all bound up with the world’s possibilities, has all consisted in the utterance and revelation and fulfilment of capacities which were in the very nature of the world on which His Light has shone.

Do you see what I mean? Christ rises on a soul. Christ rises on the world. I speak in crude and super ficial language. For the moment I make no account of the deep and sacred truth, — the truth which alone is finally and absolutely true, — that Christ has always been with every soul and all the world. I talk in crude and superficial words, and say Christ comes to any soul or to the world. What is it that happens? If the figure of the Light is true, Christ when He comes finds the soul or the world really existent, really having within itself its holiest capabilities, really moving, though dimly and darkly, in spite of all its hindrances, in its true directions; and what He does for it is to quicken it through and through, to sound the bugle of its true life in its ears, to make it feel the nobleness of movements which have seemed to it ignoble, the hopefulness of impulses which have seemed hopeless, to bid it be itself. The little lives which do in little ways that which the life of Jesus does completely, the noble characters of which we think we have the right to say that they are the lights of human history, this is true also of them. They reveal and they inspire. The worthless becomes full of worth, the insignificant becomes full of meaning at their touch. They faintly catch the feeble reflection of His life who is the true Light of the World, the real illumination and inspiration of humanity.

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