We recently bought my wife a new desk lamp. She had been having trouble reading and thought she needed new glasses. But she came home from the eye doctor with the news that she has the beginning of cataracts and a change in glasses wouldn’t help. But a brighter, higher Kelvin light would. So her new lamp shines a white, white 6000K beam on her books or artwork.
The new light helps because the cataracts cast a yellowish tinge on everything and diminishes contrast between black letters on the white background of most books. The colder, brighter light increases the contrast and helps her make out the letters. Our epistle lesson for this week, I John 1:1 – 2:2, offers several different images, but the central one figures in verse 5, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” What John has to say about “walking in the light” tells us that God’s light creates a huge contrast between accepting the “word of life,” which is Jesus (verses 1-3) and being in fellowship with God through Him, and the life of sin, which still unfortunately is part of our experience.
Like that bright light aiding my wife to read despite her developing cataracts, the light of God in Jesus Christ invites us into a fellowship with God which is available despite the way sin dims our perception of spiritual things. As verse 7 says, “if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”
Cataracts are typically a problem of those who are older, but John makes clear here that sin is a problem for us all, even when we know Jesus. So verse 10 tells us, “If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” In a bit of a paradoxical twist, we are not really seeing the light unless it lets us see the contrast between it and the darkness in us.
Our text concludes with the solution to the sin and darkness in which even Christians still find themselves. Chapter 2 verse 1 tells us that when we sin we have an “advocate” in Jesus, who, like an advocate in court, stands with us in the piercing light God shines into our lives. The NRSV translates verse 2, “and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins,” but it’s better read using the theological term, “the expiation for our sins.” Jesus brings a light which not only reveals our sins, but removes them from us. It’s as if that desk lamp could not only help Beth read, but also somehow remove her cataracts. Thanks be to God for the light of Jesus.