The Light of the World and The Persistent Darkness
The Good News of God Does Not Level Every Mountain, Break Every Chain...Yet.
The good news of God comes in darkness, but not to destroy the darkness. For destroying the dark would be to destroy the very world the light comes to save.
The Darkness of the Gospel
In most recent polls, the number one verse of Scripture that people know is, without question, John 3:16. The history behind this verse’s ascendency is, in and of itself, really fascinating. In the early church, in John’s Gospel, citations of John 1:1 outstripped this by nearly a 5-1 margin.
John 3:16’s rise to the top, as seen above, began not with the Rainbow Man or with Tim Tebow, but with the verse’s central role in evangelical preaching. Charles Finney, arguably the most famous 19th century English-speaking preacher, began the trend of using the verse as a lynchpin for his sermons, as the verse encapsulated the person and mission of Jesus, the need for repentance, and the gift of God’s grace.
It’s fine if you’ve never heard of Finney, because his more famous successor followed in his steps on this point:
The rise of the verse’s popularity with Graham—and its subsequent spillover as the go-to verse in football games—creates a vision of Christianity as beginning in love, and proceeding as a pure gift. And in many ways, this is deeply true: God is pure gift, unrestricted, unwarranted. The light moves into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it.
But in Graham’s preaching, this theme of the Gospel’s light is intertwined, subtly, with Jesus as the key to a lock, the answer to a question. The Gospel, as pure gift, opens up the world as it was meant to be lived, the longings of the heart met. This is no health-and-wealth preaching, but Graham’s preaching could not help but be heard in this register. In the post-war economic boom years, Graham’s preaching consistently addressed social issues, with Jesus as the deeper question behind the question1.
The gift of the Gospel, then, found its home inside a second set of presumptions: that this gift would be the resolution to families, to loneliness, to world peace.
Light would be accompanied by further light, the reconciliation of the world with God by the reconciliation of nations. But what is missed here is that the famous verse itself is given in utter darkness.
John 3:16 appears in a larger discussion that Jesus is having with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who has come to visit Jesus at night. This, for John, is no accident: light and dark, day and night, play a huge role in naming the work of God, and do so from the very first words of John:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
In John 1, we go on to find that God’s way of disclosure passes into time through John the Baptist, through the witness of others, through the opposition of unbelief. The growing motif is that two things are true: the light endures, and the world becomes no less hospitable to it. It does not turn earth into the heavens, but becomes an irreconcilable opposite to the tehom, the unruly darkness.
That all of this conversation with Nicodemus takes place at night is to play this cosmic contradiction out over and over again, to remind us that two things can be true. Verse 16 appears sandwiched between, interestingly, between the story of Moses’ deliverance of a rebellious people (v. 14-15), and the reaffirmation of the world’s ongoing darkness (v. 17-19).
There is no notion, in other words, that receiving the light makes things better or resolves the world. If anything, the darkness goes on, unable to overwhelm the light which persists in its midst.
For destroying the darkness would be to destroy an entire world, an ecosystem in which people’s lives are intertwined with that which is killing them. The way forward out of darkness is not to destroy the world—and in the process destroy the very ones you wish to save. The way out of darkness is presence in its midst, illuminating the folly of the dark, and suffering the inability of the dark to overcome the light.
Reframing the Everlasting Gift of God
In a word: the gift of God is not resolution of the world’s darkness, but persistence.
The recent rise of John 3:16, as the offer of God’s own light, occurred within a world which was looking not only for light in the darkness, but an end to the darkness itself. But a brief reading of John 3 reminds us that this is not the way. The darkness goes on; the Pharisees will sometimes come in quiet inquiry. And sometimes, the Pharisees, like Nicodemus, will join the insurrection of light2.
But the gift of God, if we are paying attention to the road up to John 3:16, is one in which the darkness persists, and in which there is a golden network which begins to emerge. John begins to show us signs which, one by one, create a pattern of signs which will lead to the ultimate glorification of Jesus. The transfiguration of Jesus is not included in John, I think, for this reason: we are not to confuse the Good News of God—of light in the dark—with the present transformation of the world.
The light continues on without being overcome, and it calls out in those who are gathered in it a certain kind of gift: going on. This is a complex gift, because to go on requires that we have friends who help us to go on, that we are rightly praised when we go on and recognized excellence3, that we endure opposition4, that we go forward when we are afraid5. Thomas Aquinas, in describing the virtue of fortitude, describes the various components of going-on-ness in this kind of fine-grained way, inviting us to see this gift of going on as a table with many legs, each supporting the others.
But here is the key: none of it requires that the world cooperate or give in abundance. For if the gift of God is that which draws us through the world, then God gives enough for this work, but not in a way which would somehow fill every valley in.
If anything, the light appears as a kind of counter-terror, a gleaming Cthulu from on high, threatening the very need for abundance to be a prerequisite to goodness.
Look upon your storehouses and despair.
Behold the light which fills empty jars, which raises the dead, which gives what is needed, but not in a way which always clamors for more.
For I will not give as you want, you people of endless demand.
I will give in a way which leads you out of the darkness. But the darkness was meant to teach you in its own way. For my light is a kind of darkness as well, confounding, disturbing, freeing where darkness would bind.
That we refuse the light of the world because it does not also banish the darkness is to refuse a God who comes into the world as a suffering servant. That we do not embrace the struggle of going-on is to refuse the very gift God gives to us: a gift which does not destroy the world, but shines forth in it, in patience and endless endurance.
I cover this in my 2023 article on solitude and loneliness.
Recall that it is Nicodemus who is named who brings myrrh and aloe for Jesus’ burial (19:39).
Magninimity
Patience
Courage
"An ecosystem in which people’s lives are intertwined with that which is killing them."
This is one of the most helpful, if infuriating ways of putting it I've ever heard. It expands our understanding of the "wheat and the tares," I think: each of us is already a twined mess of the two. Don't look across the aisle to wonder whether your brother or sister is chaff, look at your own heart and ask how much of it still needs to be burned away.
The Gospel announces that slow, ongoing transfiguration, and even testifies that its very slowness is for our good, for the sake of a *maximal* salvation. "We will all be changed," as Paul says. It matters that we have been permitted a conscious participation in that process.
Girard has a lot to say here about how the *desire* for these sorts of just transformations in the world is the fruit of the Gospel, while the modern belief that we can *accomplish* those transformations and that God is dragging his feat (because he is not there) is a kind of declension from it. He talks about it as "out-Christianing Christianity" in the name of peace, but in a way that ultimately multiplies violence. It's rather the *struggle itself* that is the work of faith -- to be inflamed by the Spirit with a desire for justice, while still giving the incorrigible world room to be and to become and be shepherded...
Thank you so much for this article. I know it’s one I’m going to come back to like drawing from a well. It really spoke to what my heart needed to hear. Thank you for putting your light into the darkness 🙏🏻