Easter: The light shines in the darkness

One of the most famous lines in the Bible –

The apex of the Midnight Mass service:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

It’s dramatic – it could have come from a novel, or the mouth of Yoda.
It gives the perfect visual image of hope.

But note.

It does not say the darkness was destroyed.

The darkness was no more.

The darkness remains.

This came to my mind because this week I have been compiling the Annual Report for 2021, which receives our full attention next week.

But having reviewed and remembered that year,

it was, you might say, a year of grind – all begun with that epoch long lockdown for the first three months.

There was certainly good that came from it –

But these years of pandemic will be remembered for a generation as a dark time.

I also remember two months into this year saying to you that somehow 2022 was conspiring to be an even more bleak year.

Fortunately, with a little bit of sunshine, a Cup Final penalty shoot-out – everyone loves those right?

And the Eurovision Song Contest it doesn’t seem so bad now.

Does it.

You’ll never walk alone.

Unless you’re a Spaceman.

Or Vladimir Putin.

We join the Gospel story today at a dark moment.

Judas has just in fact gone out into the night to accomplish his deeds of darkness, leaving Jesus with the remaining disciples on their last evening together, before it all goes wrong.

The other Gospels now tell the story of the Last Supper.

St John doesn’t.

In John’s Gospel, instead, Jesus essentially spends four whole chapters telling the disciples to love one another.

Now this is with good reason.

Already, five minutes before, Judas has left plotting murder against his friends;

There’s a reason Jesus waits till Judas has left to speak more intimately with his less-treacherous friends;

But Christians are no better today.

Fifteen years ago I was travelling in Ethiopia with the bishop’s office and we had to pull over and spend three nights in a hotel, because news had leaked out that a church we were going to visit had decided at a PCC meeting they were going to murder the Bishop’s administrator, who was travelling with us.

PCCs in this country are famous for dithering and spending long meetings drinking tea and disagreeing about who should be invited to judge the annual vegetable growing competition.

This PCC certainly seems decisive but perhaps not as Christian as you might hope.

If you would like to join the PCC do speak to me after church –

On the whole, we’ve found a rather healthy middle ground between minutiae and murder, which is striking in its absence from the Annual Report.

Even closer to home, this week Martyn Percy, the Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, has left the Church of England, after the University hounded him out, and the Church didn’t adequately support him.

He stated baldly on leaving: the Church is “an unsafe place to work”.

St John, we might surmise, should have talked more about the love we ought to have for one another.

His instruction in this Gospel passage is worth repeating, for the strength of their articulation.

Firstly, from Jesus: ‘as I have loved you, you also should love one another’.

The call to follow Jesus is to love as he has loved.

Loving one another has the character of the divine.

There is a level of equivalence between our ability to love and our identity and success as a Christian.

Secondly, ‘by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’.

Our mission, our evangelism, our reputation is all defined by the love that we have.

Between these two statements we might say that both our depth and integrity as a church, and also our success and public face, entirely depend on whether we are able to love one another.

But I think we can go a little farther than this.

The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas writes that ‘Love and love only is the fulfilment of everything that is [asked by Christ].

As all the boughs of a tree proceed from one root, so all the virtues are produced from one love…

The highest, the only proof of love, is to love our adversary, as did the Truth himself, who while he suffered on the cross showed his love for his persecutors.’

So we should love one another, even our enemies.

But, as Aquinas continues: ‘of which love the consummation is given in the next words: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Our Lord came to die for his enemies, but he says that he’s going to lay down his life for his friends, to show that

by loving we are able to gain over our enemies, so that they who persecute us are by anticipation our friends’.

I’ve often preached on the verse “Greater love hath no man this – to lay down his life for his friends” – it’s loved by the Army for obvious reasons.

But what an interpretation here by Aquinas:

That when Jesus says it – he doesn’t mean just his friends, the disciples in that anxious room.

He includes his enemies – but not as enemies – just as ‘anticipated friends’.

I wonder if we might be able to greet more people we meet, not just as

another face on the lane,

a person who probably doesn’t want to speak to us;

someone who is very different

someone who might delay us in where we’re going;

but as an ‘anticipated friend’.

And while a light shining in the darkness is a perfect visual image of hope,

what could be a more practical living out of hope than by treating everyone, even your grumpy neighbour, your mother-in-law, members of

St Margaret’s PCC, as an ‘anticipated friends’.

I hope you enjoy the Annual Report and perhaps even come next week to hear more of the detail.

The darkness remains.

But there is always a light shining in the darkness,

And the darkness has not overcome it.

Christian hope is based on friendship.

Friendship with one another, here and now.

Anticipated friendship with all those we have not had time to love yet!

If we can attain it, friendship with those who have done us harm.

Above all, friendship with God.

Who at an Easter some two thousand years ago anticipated our friendship, in demonstrating a love that is not bound by time or place;

That has survived 2021,

Numerous pandemics and wars;

68 years of Eurovision;

And anticipates an eternal ending in the heavenly city where there is no more death, or mourning or crying or pain.

But for now continues to draw people together here in Putney.

In love, in Christ, in friendship, longstanding and anticipated.

Amen.