Light and Hope for the New Year!

By Revd George Mwaura

January always reminds me of my childhood days. The school year in Kenya begins in January and so about this time there is a lot of excitement among children and – it’s much warmer. I hope that the Christmas excitement is over and you still have a fighting chance to keep your New Year’s resolutions. I see plenty of similarities between New Year and children – innocence and endless possibilities. As a church we are very hopeful this year as we embark on a journey to find a new minister. To quote George Elliot: one can begin so many new things with a new person … even begin to be a better person.

The Gospel of John also begins when everything was new, before creation acquired any baggage, when only the Word existed. We cannot do full justice to the complexity of John’s thought in just one sermon, but we can draw several lessons from this fourth gospel passage which opens with the words: In the beginning was the Word.

Here, John drew on Greek philosophy, in which the Word (Logos), was the ordering principle of the universe. He drew from the book of Proverbs as well, where personified Wisdom spoke and said: The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago, before the beginning of the earth. (Proverbs 8: 22–23) We can say confidently then, that, in John’s mind, at the very beginning, there was order, purity, goodness, and wisdom.

This Word was creative and dynamic. It brought the world and everything in it into existence. As abstract as this language sounds, it helps us as Christians to hear and know that our world has meaning and purpose. God created the world; it didn’t just happen as evolutionists would like us to believe. But something happened to God’s creation. Darkness crept into it, polluting the goodness, the order, and the purpose. Darkness is John’s word for the evil in God’s creation. But those of us who love dark chocolate know that dark is not always evil.

John uses darkness to contrast with the light that Christ brings into the world. This darkness is a mystery in God’s creation. John doesn’t explain it or tell us where it came from, it just seems to pop up in verse 5 like a nasty virus and even all our modern theological and philosophical minds can’t explain why evil exists. But even though we might not understand this darkness, we still recognise it. We have seen it in the rest of John’s gospel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night (ch.3). Here the darkness represents doubt struggling to find faith. Further, in chapter 9, the blind man becomes the symbol of the spiritual blindness of Jesus’ enemies. Even though they could see physically, they still walked in darkness. And when Judas goes out to betray Jesus, John summarises the evil about to be unleashed with this simple statement: And it was dark.

We recognise this darkness today in our world. We see the evil of creation in things that happen naturally: tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, typhoons and storms that kill thousands. Millions die from drought and hunger in third-world countries. Tiny babies battle incurable diseases; dementia eats away at a person’s mind until only a shell is left. Surely, these are not part of the order and goodness God intended for his creation, are they? If we move up the scale, we encounter the drug war, fuelled by human weakness and spread by the callous indifference to human life. The darkness becomes nearly pitch black when we talk about terrorism and genocides like the holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur and Gaza. How can people created by God and loved by God, become so full of hatred and violence?

And we see the darkness in ourselves. We become our own worst enemies. We have tempers we exploit, prejudices we indulge and weaknesses we ignore. We hurt the ones we love and undermine our own growth and progress. Most tragically, we see the darkness in the church. We hurt each other in the church by our insensitivity, greed and pettiness. The media broadcasts out our stories of corruption, arrogance, and sexual predatory behaviour toward children all the time: that’s real dark!

I must apologise if I am beginning to sound like a messenger of doom at the beginning of the year. However, it is important that, even as gloomy as I have made things sound, we look squarely at the darkness. We cannot turn away from it if we are to grasp the full significance of what John is trying to teach us. John knew the evil of the human heart, the corruption of politics and the cruelty of disease. Nevertheless, he declares: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. The grammar of the sentence is important. The light shines – present tense. The darkness did not overcome it. The darkness tried but failed.

The darkness has intelligence; it plots and actively opposes God, but it failed in its attempt to put out the light. God’s light continues to shine. That statement is not just wishful thinking, oh no! That statement is faith. It is a faith that refuses to surrender to the darkness of this world. Jesus reveals this light to us. He is the one who came down on Christmas Day to this darkened world. And even if we don’t see how the light shines on, or how the light will ultimately get the best of the darkness, we trust John’s words by our faith. And we remember Jesus’ words: all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life.

So, what does the year ahead have in store for us? Will it be the year that the church boldly proclaims its message and lives out its faith? Will it be the year that Arsenal wins a trophy? Will things simply turn out the way they’ve always been, or will our old problems come back into our January optimism? We don’t know what this year has in store for us. Likely, we will experience grace and blessings along with pain and frustration. Perhaps we will see the darkness in its full fury, as indeed we have already witnessed in Venezuela and Crans-Montana where forty young people died needlessly. But we will also see shafts of light that burst through this darkness. Let us hold on dearly to those shafts of light this year because with them, we can face the testing times ahead courageously knowing that light shines in the darkness, but darkness has not been able overcome it. Church, say after me:

Shine, Jesus, shine! Amen!

Happy New Year!