This Sunday, we celebrate the 4th Sunday of Advent. The next day, we celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus on Christmas Eve. On Christmas day, we will hear from the beginning of John’s Gospel with images that are theological and poetic in nature, particularly the image of light.
For the people of the ancient Mediterranean world, light and darkness were two separate realities. Darkness didn’t mean the absence of light, but rather the presence of darkness, just as light meant the presence of light. Just as light can push out the presence of darkness, darkness can push out light. Light is associated with life in John’s Gospel. Jesus comes to the world as light and life. John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus is the word in whom all living things came into being. Since we all have possession of this light as living beings, light and life go hand in hand. Light and life have their origin in God’s created work. As created beings, we can hand down this light to others, but we can’t create it ourselves.
There are times in our lives when the darkness can overwhelm us. When I was a missionary in Ecuador, I used to travel a lot in a canoe to the different villages served by our mission site. A few times, I traveled down the river after the sun had gone down, with no lights shining anywhere in the darkness of the jungle. Once, when we were speeding down the river in a canoe in the middle of the night, with just a little flashlight to give us light we hit something in the middle of the river. I was jostled around the canoe like a ragdoll; I thought that the canoe would capsize or break into pieces. Luckily, we remained in the canoe, very shaken and bruised. We had hit a tree that had fallen in the river. I felt lucky that I survived that incident.
Things can come out of the darkness of the world and hit us unexpectedly, taking our focus off Jesus and off our faith. The Roman philosopher Cicero, born a century before Jesus, described the Roman Empire as “a light to the whole world.” We can make so many other things in our lives the light, that we focus on to the exclusion of our faith: our work, our personal ambitions, our national identity, and our desires for success or material possessions. Those lights can outshine our Catholic faith & Jesus the light of the world.
It is important that we, as believers, as Catholics, strongly reaffirm with our lives the salvation that comes with the birth of Christ as a light in our world. In the humble manger in Bethlehem, this light that now illuminates our lives was made manifest to the world. Christ as a light is the way that leads to the fullness of our humanity as it is revealed to us. This Christmas season, we can ask ourselves how Jesus functions as a light in our own lives and what we can do each day in order to continue to follow the light of Christ and to be that light to others.
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