The Light of the World
Before coming back to the last of Jesus’ statements concerning Beatitude, concerning the happy life, I want to skip ahead briefly to two arresting and highly suggestive metaphors Jesus attributes to his followers:
You are the light of the world.
You are a city on a hill that cannot be hidden.
I want to meditate briefly on these graphic descriptions, to tease out their inner-meaning and to unpack how they might be related to the life-practices we’ve been examining so far.
We’ve been investigating Jesus’ teachings concerning the society he’s founding as God’s long-awaited messiah. Straight away, what everyone would have grasped, was that in announcing the in-breaking of the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus was announcing a revolution, that he was there to shake things up, to reorder the social and political structures of Roman occupied Israel, that he was there to take over.
What might have been less clear, was what sort of society he intended to found. Revolutions are notoriously big on aspirational slogans, but short on detail. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount answers. It’s about what the kind of place Christ’s Kingdom is, what sort of people live there, how they behave, what sort of values they hold and ideals they aspire to; in short, it’s about the Culture of the Kingdom. And the Beatitudes provide some initial description of the core qualities, or practices, characterising the lives of its members. They tell us what it looks like when people live with God as their King.
What’s revealed in the metaphors we’re considering, is that Jesus understands the way of life practiced in his Kingdom to be potent. It has an effect on the world just by being what it is. That’s what I think he’s suggesting in calling his followers ‘the light of the world, a city set on a hill.’ He’s saying that how they live, the life they practice as a community and as individuals makes a difference.
The question is, what difference?
Kingdoms, and cities especially, are social places. They’re abuzz with relationships and conversations, with the exchange of ideas, material goods, friendship and love. They have rules that make them safe. They have customs that make them culturally unique and their inhabitants distinctive people.
Cities are places of activity, but also places to rest.
Cities are places where your needs can be met, where you can make a life, even thrive, if you choose to stay. Not always, of course. Cities can be scary places as well.
I think, Jesus’ message to his listeners is that they, together, in the way they live, are visible, inviting, a symbol of hope, refuge and welcome.
To the weary traveler, thirsty for living water, to the wayfarer longing for safety, to the lost and the passerby, the Kingdom can be seen a long way off, beckoning all people to come, sit down, find rest.
It’s not a threatening place because it’s members practice justice and mercy. It’s a place of peace, in fact a place where people shares from the abundance God gives to them out of a knowledge that we’re all poor and dependent. It’s a place of happiness, but also a place where you can come with your sorrows and your brokenness and we’ll mourn with you in your grief. It’s a place of welcome and affirmation because it’s King shows kindness equally towards the just and the unjust and refuses to treat anyone as his enemy. So, you won’t be made to feel alien or unwelcome. You won’t be rejected for feeling lost or broken or different.
But it is also, at the same time, and for the same reason, the light of the world. In John 8 Jesus say ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Here he incorporates his followers into that metaphor. “You are the light of the world.”
I recall once speaking to a man who’d sailed in the Navy in the second war. I’m not sure how it came up, but he recounted how sailors, when they were smoking on deck at night, were require to conceal the lit end of their cigarette inside their hand because they could be seen by enemy ships from miles away. Light is visible. But the light Jesus has in mind isn’t the dim glow of a cigarette butt. It’s bright. It’s the sort of light that illuminates everything.
His point, I think, is that light makes the world visible, thus making it possible for us to live in it. His idea seems to be that by our deeds the world comes to be seen clearly: in its failures and injustices, its brokenness, its oppressive power structures and its misguided politics - through us it is exposed. The light illuminates what otherwise resides in darkness.
But it also lights up the possibility of another way, a better way of being. That’s the function of Christ’s Kingdom. And Jesus enjoins his followers not to shrink from the task, because lives lived in the imitation of Christ are integral not only to diagnosing the world’s deficits, but also pointing to the possibility of hope and repair.
What I’m suggesting is that through his Kingdom God invites people home, offering a place of welcome, care, material provision and safety – a place to find peace, acceptance, love. But it is also, and precisely for that reason, a light that reveals all that is unjust, unacceptable and wrong, not to condemn or destroy, but to redeem and transform.
My prayer is that we, together, as members of Christ’s Kingdom would hold fast to this mission in the world; that through the culture we enact and our ways of being that we’d shine as a beacon of unconditional openness, welcome and love; and that in so doing we’d illuminate the darkness of our world and point towards a better way. Put differently, that through poverty of spirit, through our mourning together, through meekness and justice and mercy and purity and peacemaking, we’d be as God intended us to be, that we’d be what God made us to be: his place of refuge calling all people, even those far off – to come home and to be made new.