exist; I have sent them my Son to enable them to know what real life is.’
(3) We must ask what this life is. Again and again, the Fourth Gospel uses the phrase eternal life. We shall discuss the full meaning of that phrase later. At present, we note this. The word John uses for eternal is aiōnios. Clearly, whatever else eternal life is, it is not simply life which lasts forever. A life which lasted forever could be a terrible curse; often the thing for which many people long is release from life. In eternal life, there must be more than duration of life; there must be a certain quality of life.
Life is not desirable unless it is a certain kind of life. Here we have the clue. Aiōnios is the adjective which is repeatedly used to describe God. In the true sense of the word, only God is aiōnios, eternal; therefore eternal life is that life which God lives. What Jesus offers us from God is God’s own life. Eternal life is life which knows something of the serenity and power of the life of God himself. When Jesus came offering men and women eternal life, he was inviting them to enter into the very life of God.
(4) How, then, do we enter into that life? We enter into it by believing in Jesus Christ. The word to believe (pisteuein) occurs in the Fourth Gospel no fewer than seventy times. ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life’ (3:36). ‘Whoever believes’, says Jesus, ‘has eternal life’ (6:47). It is God’s will that those who see the Son should believe in him and have eternal life (5:24). What does John mean by to believe? He means two things.
(a) He means that we must be convinced that Jesus is really and truly the Son of God. He means that we must make up our minds about him. After all, if Jesus is only a man, there is no reason why we should give him the utter and implicit obedience that he demands. We have to think out for ourselves who he was. We have to look at him, learn about him, study him and think about him until we are driven to the conclusion that this is none other than the Son of God.
(b) But there is more than intellectual belief in this. To believe in Jesus means to take Jesus at his word, to accept his commandments as absolutely binding, to believe without question that what he says is true.
For John, belief means the conviction of the mind that Jesus is the Son of God, the trust of the heart that everything he says is true and the basing of every action on the unshakable assurance that we must take him at his word. When we do that, we stop existing and begin living. We know what Life with a capital L really means.
LIFE AND LIGHT
John 1:4 (contd)
In him was life and the life was the light of men.
THE second of the great Johannine keywords which we meet here is the word light. This word occurs in the Fourth Gospel no fewer than twenty-one times. Jesus is the light of all people. The function of John the Baptist was to point men and women to that light which was in Christ. Twice Jesus calls himself the light of the world (8:12, 9:5). This light can be in men and women (11:10), so that they can become children of the light (12:36). ‘I have come’, said Jesus, ‘as light into the world’ (12:46). Let us see if we can understand something of this idea of the light which Jesus brings into the world. Three things stand out.
(1) The light Jesus brings is the light which puts chaos to flight. In the creation story, God moved upon the dark, formless chaos which was before the world began and said: ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis 1:3). The new-created light of God routed the empty chaos into which it came. So Jesus is the light which shines in the darkness (1:5). He is the one person who can save life from becoming a chaos. Left to ourselves, we are at the mercy of our passions and our fears.
When Jesus dawns upon life, light comes. One of the oldest fears in the world is the fear of the dark. There is a story of a child who was to sleep in a strange house. His hostess, thinking to be kind, offered to leave the light on when he went to bed. Politely he declined the offer. ‘I thought’, said his hostess, ‘that you might be afraid of the dark.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the boy, ‘you see, it’s God’s dark.’ With Jesus, the night that surrounds us is as light as the day.
(2) The light which Jesus brings is a revealing light. It is their condemnation that people loved the darkness rather than the light; and they did so because their deeds were evil; and they hated the light lest their deeds should be exposed (3:19–20). The light which Jesus brings is something which shows things as they are. It strips away the disguises and the concealments; it shows things in all their nakedness; it shows them in their true character and their true values.
Long ago, the Cynics said that the truth is hated because it is like the light to sore eyes. In a poem written by the seventh-century English saint Caedmon, there is a strange picture. It is a picture of the last day, and in the centre of the scene there is the cross; and from the cross there flows a strange blood-red light, and the mysterious quality of that light is such that it shows things as they are. The externals, the disguises, the outer wrappings and trappings are stripped away; and everything stands revealed in the naked and awful loneliness of what it essentially is.
We never see ourselves until we see ourselves through the eyes of Jesus. We never see what our lives are like until we see them in the light of Jesus. Jesus often drives us to God by revealing us to ourselves.
(3) The light which Jesus brings is a guiding light. If people do not possess that light, they walk in darkness and do not know where they are going (12:36). When they receive that light and believe in it, they walk no more in darkness (12:46). One of the features of the gospel stories which no one can miss is the number of people who came running to Jesus asking: ‘What am I to do?’ When Jesus comes into life, the time of guessing and of groping is ended, the time of doubt and uncertainty and vacillation is gone. The path that was dark becomes light; the decision that was wrapped in a night of uncertainty is illumined. Without Jesus, we are like people on an unknown road in the pitch dark. With Jesus, the way is clear.
THE HOSTILE DARK
John 1:5
And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not put it out.
HERE we meet another of John’s keywords – darkness (skotos, skotia). This word occurs seven times in the gospel. To John, there was a darkness in the world that was as real as the light.
(1) The darkness is hostile to the light. The light shines in the darkness, but, however hard the darkness tries, it cannot extinguish it. Those who sin love the darkness and hate the light, because the light shows up too many things.
It may well be that in John’s mind there is a borrowed thought here. John, as we know, was prepared to go out and to take in new ideas, if by so doing he could present and commend the Christian message to others. The great Persian religion of Zoroastrianism had at this time a very great influence on people’s thinking. It believed that there were two great opposing powers in the universe, the god of the light and the god of the dark, Ahriman and Ormuzd. This whole universe was a battleground in the eternal, cosmic conflict between the light and the dark; and all that mattered in life was the side that you chose.
So John is saying: ‘Into this world there comes Jesus, the light of the world; there is a darkness which would seek to eliminate him, to banish him from life, to extinguish him. But there is a power in Jesus that is undefeatable. The darkness can hate him, but it can never get rid of him.’ As has been truly said: ‘Not all the darkness in
