Pastor's Page: The Light of the World Is Jesus

Last week, as we reviewed how the four Gospels grappled to explain the person and significance of Jesus, we read John’s assertion that Jesus is co-eternal with God and that he was God (John 1:1). John then supplemented this briefest of explanations of Jesus’s identity through Jesus’s own “I am…” statements:

• Bread: “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger.” John 6:35
• Light: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” John 8:12 
• Gate: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.” John 10:9
• Good Shepherd: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for His sheep.” John 10:11
• Resurrection and Life: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies.” John 11:25
• Way, Truth, Life: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.” John 14:6
• True vine: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” John 15:1 

 Much more might be added, but John chose these seven since the number seven was viewed to convey completeness. It was his way of saying, “Jesus is my all in all.”

Hot on the heels of such a grandiose statement, John makes yet another astonishing assertion about Jesus: Jesus is the light of the world. Light was and remains a common metaphor. The contrast between light and darkness conveys a titanic positive/negative contrast: Good and evil; Knowledge and Ignorance; Hope and Despair; Safety and Danger; Confidence and Fear; and Life and death. In appealing to this common metaphor, John conveys that our relationship with Jesus puts us into one category or the other. We live in darkness until we believe in Jesus who brings us into his light.

At the end of his gospel, John explains that he wrote his book to convince people that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing they may have life in his name (20:31). We moderns may be struck by John’s efforts to explain this Jesus—this Jesus who really was a man, yet is co-eternal with God and who is God, who formed the worlds and called the very elements into existence and into perfect obedience, who exists in heavenly transcendence but condescends to bend his knee to form man from the clay of the earth and to breathe the breath of life into his body. Yes, we moderns struggle to believe all this about Jesus, but those of us who have believed, we have found Jesus to be our all in all. Truly, in him is life, and that life is the light of all mankind (John 1:4).

Pastor's Page: In the Beginning...Jesus

Those first century men and women who personally encountered Jesus in his lifetime, who became his disciples, and experienced the power of his resurrection and his indwelling Spirit, had to struggle mightily to find the words to explain who he really was. He was a man—no doubt about that, but he was more than a man, even more than an extraordinary man. He was more than just a great prophet or rabbi. He was more than an anointed healer, more than a king, more than an apostle sent by God.

Jesus’s identity confounded people all his days. Many scoffed, “He’s just a man from Nazareth.” His followers, however, made great professions of faith. Peter confessed that Jesus was the Messiah, the son of the living God. The Apostle Thomas declared of him, “My Lord and My God.” 

It took some time for Christians to hammer out the doctrine of the Trinity, even though all the elements necessary for Trinitarianism were already in place in the New Testament. For us, we confidently identify Jesus as God the Son, but we come to such a conclusion only in the aftermath of centuries of debates and theologizing. The earliest Jewish Christians, however, struggled to explain Jesus’s identity without violating their fierce monotheism forged by the divine words, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isa 45:5).

We see the struggle to give the right place to Jesus in the four Gospels, especially in their respective introductions. Mark explains Jesus by linking him to John the Baptist and depicting the Baptist as the Isaianic forerunner to the Lord’s Messiah, in fulfillment of all the scriptures. Matthew affirms Mark’s portrait but adds that Jesus fulfills the Abrahamic covenant to bless all the nations through the Jewish king. By tracing Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam, Luke makes an even more extraordinary claim about Jesus—the New Man Jesus overturns the failure of the Old Man Adam and reverses the curses.

In introducing Jesus, John the Evangelist outdoes the other three gospel writers. Yes, John agrees with Matthew, Mark and Luke, but John dares to make an even higher claim for Jesus. He depicts Jesus’s identity as centered in God: “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God” (John 1:1). More specifically, Jesus is co-eternal with God, and ever-present with God from the beginning. Still, even such striking alignment with God is not yet adequate to explain Jesus. John takes it a step further and identifies Jesus himself as God himself: “The Word was God.”

This Jesus, who is the light of the world, who created all things, is the source of everything we need. He is the bread. He is the Light. He is the Gate. He is the Good Shepherd. He is the Resurrection and the Life. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He is the True Vine. He is. He is.

Pastor Jim