John 8:12
I am.
Those are two important words. Not because Popeye said them: "I am what I am."
You have to go way back to the beginning of the primary salvation event in the Jewish scriptures, the Exodus. Moses, born of a Hebrew slave woman, cast away in a basket down the Nile river as an infant because all Hebrew children were supposed to be killed, plucked out of the water by the daughter of Pharaoh, raised in Pharaoh's household, killed an Egyptian soldier for beating a Hebrew slave, and ran away to the wilderness.
In the wilderness, Moses met a girl, the daughter of a Midianite priest. The priest’s name was Jethro. The girl’s name was Zipporah. Moses started out working on the lowest rung for Jethro, becoming a shepherd watching over the sheep. A job Moses knew nothing about. He had grown up in a palace, for goodness sake.
One day, out with the sheep, Moses saw a strange site: a bush on fire, but not being burned up. It was enough to get him to take a detour and check it out. Then, even weirder, a Voice spoke out of the bush. God. God was in the fiery bush.
Moses and God had a conversation through the burning bush. The conversation was about God wanting Moses to free all the Hebrew slaves. At one point in the conversation, Moses asked, "What if I go to them and tell them about this big plan, and they ask me, 'What's this God's name'"
God's reply? "God said to Moses, 'I-AM-WHO-I-AM. Tell the people of Israel, 'I-AM sent me to you.'" In Hebrew, YAHWEH. A verb; an action word. God's name is an action word. I am who I am; or, I am what I am; or, I will be what I will be." But basically, "I AM."
So, in John's gospel, Jesus makes seven "I AM" statements. Seven, is a holy number, because God created the world in seven days. So seven is a number strongly associated with God and God's power. Then, for Jesus to make these seven statements beginning with, I AM, would be clearly saying to people who knew the Moses story, that he, Jesus, is God.
Which would have, and did, make the Jewish religious leaders very angry. To equate yourself to God, to call yourself God was blasphemy. So Jesus really pushed the blasphemy envelope by saying it seven times.
I will be talking about six of the seven I AM statements during the church season of Lent. Hopefully they will make us think about who Jesus was and is, how Jesus defined himself, and what that means for those of us who love him and follow him. Especially as we journey towards Easter and Resurrection Sunday.
The first, that I will have us look at this morning, is, “I AM the light of the world.” Let’s hear it again: “Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I AM the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
Jesus made this statement during the Feast of Booths—a special feast day on the Jewish calendar. It was also called Sukkot. Sukkot commemorates the forty-year period during which the children of Israel were wandering in the desert, living in temporary shelters.
During the Feast of Booths, there were large golden lamps that were lit in the Temple during the feast. It may have been these large lamps, casting out a glowing light in all directions, that Jesus was alluding to in his statement.
“I am the light…” Light stood for a lot of things. Primarily light stood for God. It was the first thing God created when God made the world. “And God said, Let there be light.” Without light, nothing else in creation could be sustained. So light and God were so important—without God, without light, nothing can grow and live. Nothing else can happen unless the light—unless God—comes first.
Secondly, light stood for the truth.
A defendant took the witness stand. The judge asked him to put up his right hand and answer the following question: "Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?"
The defendant responded, "I'll try anything once."
This word for truth that is associated with the metaphor of light, means telling the truth, being the truth, all the time, no matter what. It isn't about the truth only in certain circumstances.
We've talked before if it is humanly possible to tell the truth all the time in every instance. I, for one, don't think it is possible for any human being to tell or be the truth in every circumstance. Mainly because we don't know every nuance of every situation. It's not that we intentionally lie. We inadvertently lie because we just don't know everything.
But with Jesus as the light, here is truth all the time. Sometimes that truth comes in the form of insight, in which Jesus, through a parable, shares the insight of truth, even though we have to figure it out and wrestle with it ourselves. In this way, the word insight, could be another way we understand light, and how Jesus makes that happen in our lives.
"I am the light of the world." The world! Not just for a small area of the world. Not just for the Jews. Not just for Israel. But the world. The whole world. Jesus was defining what kind of Messiah he would be and the scope of his influence and the reach of his light.
One of the other great verses in the gospel of John is John 3:16. “For God so loved the WORLD, that he gave his only son, so that EVERYONE who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The world. Everyone. The horizon of Jesus’ light is as wide as you can see.
And the assumption behind Jesus’ statement about the light for world is that the world needs Jesus’ light. Jesus wouldn’t need to be the light of the world, if the world didn’t need that light. But it does.
The world needs Jesus’ light because of the next part of the verse that says the world walks in darkness. Darkness usually stands for three things in the Bible. One is ignorance, but particularly ignorance of the ways of God. I think this ignorance is growing. People are leaving God behind, but I think people are for the most part ignorant of who it is they are leaving behind. They may be giving up on God, but they don’t even know what and who they are giving up on. They are ignorant of God and their ignorance becomes a kind of darkness that tricks them into giving up.
Darkness also stands for wickedness. Living in darkness is living with a certain obscurity where nothing is really known and nothing is that important. Living in that kind of darkness makes a person think, after a while, that the whole world is like that. Within that obscurity, a person becomes a rule unto one’s self. Which leads to wickedness. The only way out is in the light—to move out of that self-directed obscurity to the light of Jesus.
And thirdly, darkness in the Bible stands for misery. Someone who has locked themselves into ignorance and wickedness is also miserable. The darkness of misery becomes a way of life, and living under the assumption that there is no way out of the misery.
One of Leonardo Da Vinci’s greatest works was the painting of “The Last Supper.” This painting is an amazing work of art. What is interesting about this painting is the expressions of the disciples when they are told that one of them would betray them.
What you may not know is that Da Vinci painted real people that he knew with expressions as the disciples in the painting. When he was painting the face of Christ, he sought long and hard for the right face. In one of the churches in Italy he found a young man named Pietro Bandinelli. His face became the face of Jesus and the focal point of the painting.
By 1498 all the disciples' faces were painted except one: Judas Iscariot. He needed one that had the miseries of SIN all over it. After a long and hard search he found just the man, and Leonardo stated the man's face made him shudder. He asked the man his name, and the man stated, "I am Pietro Bandinelli, the one who you painted 3 years ago as the face of Jesus."
What happened? A life of misery in the darkness of sin. Misery that resulted from sin had created a whole different face on Bandinelli. That’s why we need the light of Jesus to keep us from becoming people of misery and darkness and ignorance and wickedness and having all that contort our faces into visages we are ashamed of.
The remarkable thing about Jesus’ statement that he is the light of the world, is that it is the only “I AM” statement that we are told we share with him. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way let your light shine before others…” (Matthew 5:14-16)
So there it is. All that Jesus is as the light of the world, so are we to be. Our work is to be the light of God and the light of truth for a world that would rather be lost in ignorance, wickedness and misery.
But it is important to remember that being the light is not about us. People aren’t looking at us, but at Jesus as the light. Our job is to make the light of Jesus known. Not point at ourselves.
A man, sitting in an English pub in the old days, relates what he saw outside the window:
I was sitting in the gloamin' and a man passed the window. He was a lamplighter. He pushed his pole into the lamp and lighted it. Then he went to another and another. Now I couldn't see him. But I knew where he was by the lights as they broke out down the street, until he had left a beautiful avenue of light. Now I couldn't see him. No, but his light could be seen. And that was the important thing. It was the lamplighter's business to light the lamps, not to make himself seen. What matters if people take little notice of you? The important thing is to make them take notice of your light.
We are the light of the world, but we don’t shed our own light. We shed the light of Christ and leave that light in the wake of wherever we go in the world. Just as the man in the pub looked out and watched the lamplighter progress down the street, so we as Jesus’ light for the world should be able to look back and see all the places we have left Jesus’ light behind us in all the places we had been that day.
"I am the light of the world," said Jesus. And, "You are the light of the world."
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