Imagining the Lectionary: you were darkness (Lent 4A)

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light (Ephesians 5:8)

Having let my imagination run riot with the theme of darkness and light what is striking about this verse is the stark and unsparing declaration that once we did not simply live in darkness, we were darkness.

Consider the full implication of that for a moment. Darkness is an integral part of our personality, it is inherent in our nature. Darkness is not an external circumstance which envelops us and for which we are not responsible; it actually has its origin within us and, in a profoundly troubling social-psychological sense, emanates from us to envelop others. This is not just a mere absence of light, it is something much more worrisome than that, akin to an inverse and anti-light energy which radiates negativity and is the very opposite of all that is positive in life. Admittedly I am talking poetry here, not physics, but, as the Bible makes very clear within its pages, the metaphor of darkness is well worth exploring.

The image is an inverse rendering of the lamp assembly from a lighthouse. As such it appears like a photographic negative. Created, held and loved in the image of God, lit up and suffused with Grace, we nonethless each have the capacity to become like dark lighthouses, sending out beams of darkness which abolish the light and suck it out of life.  This is much more the active sense of darkness which I see in the Bible: when John's gospel affirms that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it, the darkness is tangibly and oppressively over and against the light; it is not passive.

In literature, JRR Tolkein personalised this into the all-seeing eye of Sauron, the epically evil presence which broods over the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and casts his dark malevolence across Middle Earth. And if that is too fanciful an illustration, we only have to consider Mugabe, Gaddafi, Mubarak and their ilk to get the sense of an all pervasive, self-obsessed and self-justifying wickedness which dominates and oppresses others within regimes of darkness. Dark lighthouse leadership is the curse of human history and has cost millions upon millions of lives. Think Hitler, think Stalin, and you get the point.

What the text does is help us to be honest about this dark tendency within human nature and recognise any light-denying tendencies within ourselves. The change which Jesus brings is to be seen in "all that is good and right and true." (Ephesians 5:9) The presence of the light of the world lights us up with an intentional faith which calls forth light from the very centre of our being. Trusting to the light of the world, we know the light of life and are called to radiate its liberating presence for the sake of others.

The dark bulb which is sometimes energised within us need not and will not be the last word about us. For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.