Meditation for April 18

From The Rev. Peter A. Munson

1 John 2:1-11

 

The Darkness and the Light Within

 

"Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.  Whoever says, 'I am in the light,' while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness.  Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling.  But whoever hates a brother or sister is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought on blindness."  (1 John 2:8-11)

 

To understand the "new commandment" that the writer of 1 John writes about, you really need to be familiar with the Gospel of John.  There were some very old commandments (from the Old Testament) that had to do with love - love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus gave a "new" commandment about love, and what made it new was that He pointed to Himself as the standard.  "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are My disiciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13:34-35)  Similarly, in chapter 15:  "This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends." (John 15:12-13)

 

The way that Jesus loved us - ultimately - was to lay down His life for us.  And that is the kind of love He challenges us to offer - a sacrificial, seeking-the-welfare-of the-other type of love.  Though reports are still coming in as I write this, we are hearing some stories of that kind of love in this terrible Virginia Tech tragedy.  A professor - a survivor of the Holocaust - who used his body to bar the door while some of his students jumped out of the classroom windows to safety.  He was killed in the process, giving up his life for others.  Students who held a door closed with their feet, preventing the gunman from returning to a classroom where a number of people had already been killed.  Clearly they helped save the lives of some of their classmates.

 

With the gunman, we are left with so many unanswerable "why" and "how" questions.  My children ask me these questions, and as adults, we ask them, too. Why would someone do this?  How could someone kill so many innocent people?  If he was that angry and unhappy and bent on killing himself, why didn't he just kill himself, and not 32 other people?  Unanswerable questions, it seems to me.

 

What we do know, I think, is that there is a battle going on in the world between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  There is light and there is darkness.  And if we are really honest with ourselves, I think we have to admit that those things - both of them -exist within each of us.  There is a light within us that is about connecting to and reflecting the light of God - the light of Christ.  This light is about our best and most creative and loving selves.  There is also a shadow within each of us, a certain darkness, a place where we don't want God's light to penetrate, a thing that we're not even sure we want to look at ourselves, because we are rather afraid of this place -our own dark place.  It is what you might describe as the worst and most destructive part of ourselves, and that place where our hatred and our rage and our bitter resentment resides.

 

Jesus came to redeem not only all of us, but all of me, and that includes the dark places within myself.  And the only way for those dark places to be redeemed is for me to allow God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit) to shine the light of His love on those places.  We must have the courage to say to God, in effect, "Lord, I get a glimpse of this raging and hateful place in me once in a while.  Mostly it leaks out - sort of against my will - in my unconscious moments.  I try to stuff this part of myself down so I don't see it, but it leaks out.  And when I see it, I am so ashamed of it and of myself that my tendency is to stuff it down again.  But I know, Lord - I know, deep down - that stuffing it back down won't accomplish anything.  I know that if I do that, it's only going to build up and boil over in some bigger way.  I know, Lord, that I need to have the courage to let You shine the light of Your Love on my darkness, so that it can be transformed into light and love.  Lord, I need You so much.  I need You to redeem ALL of me, and for You to do that, I must open up ALL of me to You.  And I must not hide any part of myself from myself.  Help me to have that degree of vulnerability and honesty, O Lord.  Help me to have that degree of trust in You.  Because if I don't, I am afraid of what might happen - of the destruction I might do to others, of the destruction I might do to myself.  Yes, Lord, I desperately need You and Your Light."

 

This lesson from 1 John gives us a certain type of warning.  If we are feeling some type of hate towards another human being, THAT is our warning from God.  When we notice that emotion, those hateful thoughts, it is as if God is saying to me and to you:  "Warning!  Warning!  Something is amiss here!  This is your darkness, Pete.  This is your shadow.  Don't try to ignore it or stuff it back down.  You need to accept it, own it, even befriend it.  And the way you befriend it is by owning it, by confessing it, by bringing it to Me in prayer and saying, 'Lord, I don't really know what to do with this darkness within.  I can't just "will" it away.  I need Your help.  I know that You can touch it and redeem it and transform it.  I need You to transform this darkness, O Lord, and make me whole.'"

 

To the extent that we can let our Lord in, and let Him touch even the darkest places of our lives, then we can be people of love, even people who love sacrificially - people who love as Jesus loves us.  It's nice and warm and feels good to be in the light.  But it seems to me we also have much to learn from our darkness, from our shadow.  If we allow Him, if we trust in God enough, He will walk us through what we need to go through with respect to our shadow, and bring us out to the other side.  And make no mistake.  The other side is a place of blazing light - the burning light that is the light and love and transforming power of God.