Rumours of Light
The opening of John’s gospel provides some of the richest poetry in all literature. As an erstwhile English teacher, I am drawn back time and time again to the complex layering of metaphor as John urges us to begin to conceptualise this miracle of miracles – God made flesh.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
As we move into this season of Advent, these words will resound in churches all around the world. Each year I fear that familiarity will prevent me from witnessing the wonder that is the incarnation.
We sanitise Jesus’ birth. We make the stable clean. We allow Mary and Joseph to knock on a few doors and trundle away, only to be quickly housed in a warm barn with friendly animals who look on in wonder, all the while providing a comfortable path to tread as we walk through the nine lessons and carols.
And yet, when we stop to truly hear what John is saying – that Jesus was fully God and fully human – it is mind blowing. What an outrageous, utterly audacious claim! The metaphors employed only begin to aid us in the imaginative leap needed to conceive of this wonderous event.
When we are told in Genesis that God created humanity in God’s own image, we struggle to comprehend what this might mean. However, to be made in God’s image after the birth of Christ – well this allows us to glimpse the Holy in another way. Instead of sullying God by our messy bodies, these bodies are lifted up. The inherent worth of every single human being is reaffirmed through this act of God connecting with us in such a visceral way. Perhaps, then, we should consider Jesus as the most fully human-being that ever lived – the true Imago Dei who walked the earth.
Such a wonder prompts me to pause.
I find myself struggling to grasp the theology of the image of God in every person and the image of Christ in his followers. The incarnation fundamentally changes our understanding of God, yes. But I cannot help asking a more basic question.
If we all bear the mark of something special, separating us from the rest of the material world, then why are so many people forgotten? When war and famine rip through many parts of the world, how should those of us who are safe and comfortable respond? Do we see God in the faces of those who are weak and vulnerable or do we look away because it’s uncomfortable?
What I have found most interesting since working alongside folk in the global church is that when we come close to those who suffer in the bodily sense, though uncomfortably aware of our own unwarranted privilege, it is there that we are permitted to glimpse the face of the divine. In the forgotten places, though we may initially see only darkness, there are rumours of God’s divine light.
Now, as we all know, the apostle John loved a layered metaphor. The title of this piece is borrowed from Gideon Heugh’s poem ‘Rumours of light’. In his poem, he tells us that hope is ‘lingering beneath the dark horizon; the hallowed spark hiding within the folds of night’. This tentative light can so easily be missed when darkness seems to dominate. But it is wondrous to behold. To borrow another of Heugh’s phrases, we witness ‘the breath of wonder poised above our aching souls’ when the light of God shines out from the lives of those we might otherwise overlook. Reverberating back, speaking into our darkest places, this light helps to illuminate and irradiate the ugliness within each of us. It is with the help of others’ light, then, that we can share in God’s life-giving, living light.
Recently I have been dipping into Walter Brueggemann’s book Sabbath as Resistance. In this work he calls us to a radical resistance against our culture of now. The ‘me-centred’, consumer-driven West leaves little time to meet with God. In this run up to Christmas, when we will be so tempted to overspend, overeat, overindulge in a multitude of ways, let’s be intentional and STOP.
May we stop and linger on the rumours of light in the furthest parts of God’s global church for it is there that we will meet with our creator God.
Emma Lutton, Communications Coordinator, CMSI