The passage: This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. And this is the condemnation: light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. (1 John i. 5; John iii. 19.)
We call the story of Jesus, told so differently yet to my mind so consistently by four narrators, the gospel. What makes it good news? Not everything in it is: it is hardly good news that the one good man was cast out of the world in torture and shame, or that he came to his own and his own did not receive him. If we asked a theologian, and he answered as a true man from his own heart and not from the tradition of the elders, we would see what was good news to him, though it might be anything but good news to some of us; the deliverance he finds may rest on notions of God that to not a few of us contain as little good as news. Some apply the word not to the tale itself but to deductions from the epistles and their own sense of evil, and to share the deliverance they find we would first have to believe in an unjust God from whom we must seek refuge: a message from hell, not an evangel. They call him just, but say he does what seems to the best in me the essence of injustice. They will say I judge after the flesh; is it to the flesh the Lord appeals when he asks why we do not judge for ourselves what is right? Is he not the light that lights every man who comes into the world? They tell me I was born in sin, and I know it is true; they tell me also that I am judged as severely as if I had been born in righteousness, and that I know to be false. They make God’s purity and justice require that he judge us, born in evil for which we were not accountable, by our sinfulness instead of our guilt, and treat every wrong I have done, perhaps scarcely recognizing it as evil, as if I had done it freely with no taint of evil in me. Is there any gospel in telling me God is unjust, but that there is a way of deliverance from him? Show me my God unjust, and you wake in me a damnation from which no power can deliver me, least of all God himself. It may be good news to those content with a God capable of unrighteousness, if only he is on their side!
Who would not rejoice to hear from Matthew, Mark or Luke, in a few words, what in the story made him call it good news! With John we have his answer, and in one sentence of two members he gives us not the gospel according to John but the gospel according to Jesus Christ himself. His gospel gives us all about Jesus, the message concerning him; now he tells us the soul of that message, what makes it good news: the news Jesus brought concerning the Father and gave the disciples to deliver. All through the story Jesus, in all he does, is and says, is telling this news; here John says in so many words what he has heard from The Word, what in sum he has gathered from Jesus as the message he must declare. He received it in no systematic form; it is what a life, the life, a man, the man, taught him. The Word is the Lord; the Lord is the gospel. The good news is no bundle of sticks gathered by a man on the Sabbath.
Every man must read the Word for himself, one in one shape, another in another; all will be right if it is indeed the Word they read, and they read it by the lamp of obedience. He who is willing to do the Father’s will shall know the truth of Jesus’ teaching; the spirit is given to those who obey him.
But let us hear how John reads the Word, in what is his version of the gospel.
“This then is the message,” he says, “which we have heard of him, and declare to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Ah, my heart, this is indeed good news for you! If God is light, what more can I seek than God himself! Away with your doctrines, your salvation from the “justice” of a God it is a horror to imagine, your iron cages of false metaphysics! I am saved, for God is light! That you should be yourself, my God, is enough for time and eternity. Whatever seems to me darkness, I will not believe of you. If I mistake light for darkness, will you not reveal the matter, showing me I saw only the husk and not the kernel, and letting your thought stream out upon me? It will not hurt me to mistake light for darkness so long as I do not take darkness for light; the one comes from blindness of intellect, the other from blindness of heart and will. Where would the good news be if John said, “God is light, but what he means by light is not what you mean; it may be horrible darkness to you”? The light of God may be so bright that we see nothing, but that is infinite hope of light, not darkness. To the wicked, it is true, “the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light”; but that is not because their conscience judges good and evil oppositely to the good man’s. When a man says, “Evil, be thou my good,” he means by evil what God means by it, and by good he means pleasure; he cannot make the meanings change places. To say that what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to God is blasphemy; to say light in God and light in man differ in kind is to speak against the spirit of light. God is light far beyond what we can see, but what we mean by light, God means; what is light to God is light to us, or would be if we saw it, and will be when we do. He means us to be jubilant that he is what his children, made in his image, mean by light; whatever in him looks dark to them is dark only by excellent glory. Living Light, you will not have me believe anything dark of you! You will have me so sure of you as to dare to say that what I see as dark, as unlike the Master, is not of God! If my eye is not single enough to see your light, you will punish me, and I thank you, and purge my eyes of their darkness, that I may become, with your other children, an heir of that light which is your Godhead and makes your creatures need to worship you. “In your light we shall see light.”
In our present imperfection not everyone will see the same light; but light is light, and what each does see is his safety if he obeys it. As Christ’s image is mirrored in us, we shall know what is and is not light. But nothing will prove to be light that is not of the same kind as what we mean by light. The darkness still in us sometimes makes us doubt whether a thing is light or darkness; but when the eye is single, the whole body will be full of light.
To fear the light is to be untrue, or at least comes of untruth. No one needs fear the light of God; nothing in it can be inimical to our nature, which is of God, or to anything worthy in us. All dread of danger in the light comes of the darkness still in us who do not love the truth with all our hearts, and will vanish as the light fills us more. There is no way of thought or action we count admirable in man in which God is not altogether adorable, and no loveliness that makes man dear to his brother that is not in God, only infinitely better. He is God our saviour; Jesus is our saviour because God is. He will soothe and satisfy his children better than any mother her infant. The only thing he will not give them is leave to stay in the dark. If a child cries, “I want the darkness,” or “Let me die!”, he will not give it; he gives what his child needs, often by refusing what he asks, saying in effect, “I have the right to content you, not by giving you your will but mine, which is your one good. You know what you ask, but not what you refuse.” There are good things God must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them, and gets him to make it. No part of our nature shall go unsatisfied, not by lessening it but by enlarging it to embrace an ever-enlarging enough.
Come to God, then, my brother, my sister, with all your desires and ideals, your longing for purity and unselfishness, your aspiration after child-life in the breath of the Father; come with all your weaknesses, shames, futilities and failures, even the sick sense of having missed the tide of true affairs; come with your doubts, fears, dishonesties and meannesses. Be sure he will take you and all your miserable brood, whether of draggle-winged angels or covert-seeking snakes, into his care, the angels for life, the snakes for death, and you for liberty in his limitless heart! For he is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If he were a king, a governor, The Almighty, you might well doubt whether there could be light enough in him for you and your darkness; but he is your father, and more your father than the word can mean in any lips but his who said, “my father and your father, my God and your God”; and such a father is infinite, perfect light. If anything seems to be in him that you cannot be content with, be sure that the ripening of your love to your fellows and to him will make you know that anything else than just what he is would have been an endless loss to you. Do not be afraid to build on the rock Christ, as if your holy imagination might build too high for that rock. Let no one persuade you there is a little darkness in him because of something he has said which his creature interprets into darkness; the interpretation is the work of the enemy, a handful of tares of darkness sown in the light. Nor let your cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light while it looks dark to you. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. Of all evils, to misinterpret what God does and then say it must be right because God does it is of the devil. Do not try to believe anything that affects you as darkness; even if you thereby refuse something true, you will do less wrong to Christ than by accepting as his what you can see only as darkness. But let your words be few, lest you say with your tongue what you will afterward repent with your heart. Above all, believe in the light, that it is what you call light, though the darkness in you may at times make you doubt whether you are really seeing it.
“But there is another side to the matter: God is light indeed, but there is darkness; darkness is death, and men are in it.”
Yes; darkness is death, but not death to him that comes out of it.
It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong, for not coming out of the darkness to the light, the living God, who sent his son, the light, into the world to guide him home. Let us hear what John says about the darkness.
Here too we have, I think, the apostle’s own word; from the 13th verse he begins, I think, to speak in his own person. In the 19th he says, “This is the condemnation”; not that men are sinners, not that they have done what they were ashamed of even at the time, not that they have murdered, betrayed, or ground the faces of the poor, making money by their fellows’ groans. They are condemned for no hideous thing but that they will not leave such doings behind: light is come into the world, and men would not come out of the darkness to the light, but “loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” Choosing and clinging to evil, loving the darkness because it suits their deeds, turning their backs on the inbreaking light, how can they but be condemned, if God is true, if he is light and darkness alien to him! Whatever honesty is in man must allow that their condemnation is in the very nature of things, and must rest on them and abide.
But if one utters some individual truth which another man has made a cog in his system, he risks being supposed to accept all the toothed wheels of that system. I therefore go on to say that it does not follow, because light has come into the world, that it has fallen on this or that man. He has his portion of the light that lights every man, but the revelation of God in Christ may not yet have reached him. A man might pass the Lord in a crowd and not be to blame, as the Jews of Jerusalem were, for not knowing him; a Nathanael might have stopped at the merest glimpse, but not all growing men are yet without guile like him. Not everyone who has not yet come to the light is keeping his face turned away from it. We dare not say that this or that man would not have come had he seen it; we do not know that he will not come the moment he does. God gives every man time. The condemnation is of those who, having seen Jesus, refuse to come to him, or pretend to come but do not do what he says. They have excuses at hand; but as soon as a man begins to make excuse, the time has come when he might be doing what he excuses himself from. How many believe there is something somewhere with the claim of light upon them, and go on and on to get more out of the darkness! This neglected consciousness gives broad ground for the Lord’s expostulation, “You will not come to me that you might have life!”
“All manner of sin and blasphemy,” the Lord said, “shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven.” God speaks, as it were, like this: “I forgive you everything. Not a word more about your sins; only come out of the darkness of your exile into the light of your home and birthright, and do evil no more. Lie, cheat, oppress, slander and envy no more; love your neighbour as I love you; be my good child; trust in your father. I am light; come to me, and you shall see things as I see them, and hate the evil thing. I will make you love what you now call good and do not love. I forgive all the past.”
“I thank you, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.”
“No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance; to forgive it would be to take part in it. What is past I pass over, but he who goes on doing the same annuls my forgiveness. Whatever sin a man has committed, I forgive him; but to choose to go on sinning, how can I forgive that? It would be to nourish evil and let my creation go to ruin. Shall I keep you alive to do things hateful in the sight of all true men? If a man refuses to come out of his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there.”
There is no excuse for this refusal. If we were punished for every fault, there would be no respite and no quiet in which to repent; but God passes by all he can, forgetting tens of thousands of sins; only we must begin to be good. He who refuses must be punished and punished, through all the ages, until he yields and comes to the light, that his deeds may be seen by himself for what they are, and the Father at last have his child again. For the man who resists to the full in this world there may be a whole age during which his sin shall not be forgiven; but never can it be forgiven until he repents. How can they who will not repent be forgiven, except in the sense that God does all he can to make them repent? Who knows but such sin may need for its cure the continuous punishment of an aeon?
There are three conceivable kinds of punishment: mere retribution, which I take to be entirely human, or rather inhuman, since what is not divine is not essential to humanity but an intrusion of evil; that which works repentance; and that which refines and purifies, working for holiness. The punishment that falls on those whom the Lord loves because they have repented is very different from that which falls on those he loves indeed but cannot forgive because they hold fast to their sins.
The word forgive can also be used in various ways. A man might say to his son, “I forgive you. You did not know what you were doing. I will say no more about it.” Or, “I forgive you; but I must punish you, for you have done the same thing several times, and I must make you remember.” Or, “I am seriously angry. I cannot forgive you. I must punish you severely; the thing was too shameful to pass by.” Or, “Unless you change entirely I will have nothing more to do with you or answer for you, and must warn my friends not to trust you. Never, till I see a greater change than I dare hope for in this world, will I forgive you. I would die to save you, but there is nothing in you now on which to rest forgiveness; to say I forgive you would be to say, Do what you like; I do not care.” So God may forgive and punish; and he may punish and not forgive, that he may rescue. To forgive the sin against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of lies, and make it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved. He cannot forgive the man who will not come to the light because his deeds are evil. Against that man his fatherly heart is moved with indignation.