I Am the Light of the World

[0:00] We hope that you enjoy this teaching from Christ Church. This material is copyrighted and no unauthorized duplication, redistribution, or any other use of any part is permitted without prior consent from Christ Church.

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[0:26] Good morning. I'm Megan Doxon, and I am part of the Thursday evening North Berkeley community group. Today's scripture reading is from the Gospel according to John 8, verse 12, and chapter 9, verses 1 to 17 and 24 to 41, as printed in your liturgy.

[0:49] When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.

[0:59] As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?

[1:12] Neither this man nor his parents sinned, said Jesus, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming when no one can work.

[1:27] While I am in the world, I am the light of the world. After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes.

[1:38] Go, he told him, wash in the pool of Siloam. This word means sent. So the man went and washed and came home seeing. His neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging asked, Isn't this the same man who used to sit and beg?

[1:55] Some claimed that he was. Others said, no, he only looks like him. But he himself insisted, I am the man. How then were your eyes opened, they asked.

[2:06] He replied, the man they called Jesus made some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.

[2:18] Where is this man, they asked him. I don't know, he said. They brought to the Pharisees the man who had been blind. Now the day on which Jesus had made the mud and opened the man's eyes was a Sabbath.

[2:32] Therefore, the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his sight. He put mud on my eyes, the man replied, and I washed, and now I see.

[2:45] Some of the Pharisees said, this man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath. But others asked, how can a sinner perform such signs? So they were divided.

[2:57] Then they turned again to the blind man. What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened. The man replied, he is a prophet. A second time, they summoned the man who had been blind.

[3:11] Give glory to God by telling the truth, they said. We know this man is a sinner. He replied, whether he is a sinner or not, I do not know. One thing I do know.

[3:22] I was blind, but now I see. Then they asked him, what did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered, I have told you already, and you did not listen.

[3:34] Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples too? Then they hurled insults at him and said, you are this fellow's disciple.

[3:45] We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses, but as for this fellow, we don't even know where he comes from. The man answered, now that is remarkable.

[3:57] You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly person who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind.

[4:11] If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. To this they replied, you were steeped in sin at birth. How dare you lecture us? And they threw him out.

[4:23] Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, do you believe in the son of man? Who is he, sir? The man asked. Tell me so that I may believe in him.

[4:35] Jesus said, you have now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking with you. Then the man said, Lord, I believe, and he worshipped him. Jesus said, for judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see, and those who see will become blind.

[4:53] Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, what? Are we blind too? Jesus said, if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin.

[5:03] But now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. This is the gospel of the Lord. Thank you for that reading, Megan.

[5:14] Good morning, everyone. My name is Andrew, one of the pastors here at Christ Church. Will you join me in prayer as we listen to what God has to say from his word? Lord, we come before you wanting to encounter the light of the world.

[5:30] And we give thanks to you that that is who you are. You are indeed the light of the whole world. And we pray for that light to shine on our world in moments like these.

[5:44] And every day, this dark and broken world that so desperately needs the light of Christ. So we pray for that light, and we pray that it would start here with us.

[5:55] Use the preaching of your word to bring glory to yourself and light to the nations, we pray. In Jesus' strong name. Amen. So we are continuing our series in the Gospel of John.

[6:08] And the good news about Jesus that John especially wants to communicate is that Jesus is God himself. Come to be with us in the flesh. He's Yahweh among us, the great I am God among us.

[6:20] Come to be everything that our darkened, sin-stained world needed but never deserved. And that's why the Gospel of John famously has these I am statements. Two weeks ago, we talked about Jesus saying, I am, what, the bread of life?

[6:34] Last week, Jonathan preached about Jesus saying, before Abraham was, I am. Well, today on Transfiguration Sunday, this day that we remember Jesus' brilliance and the brightness that emanated from him in the presence of his Father, we are looking at the next I am statement where he says, I am the light of the world.

[6:57] I am the light of the world. Now, to understand what this means and why it matters, I want to invite us to imagine a world without light. Try to imagine that, a world without light.

[7:08] If you think about it, it would be both literally and metaphorically a pretty dark place, right? I mean, there couldn't be life as we know it. And even if there was life somehow, imagine how you would know and understand anything without light.

[7:24] It wouldn't be by sight, right? You'd have to be like, oh, this is a rock because it tastes like a rock. Or it smells like a rock. It sounds like a rock. But you couldn't actually say that this is a rock because I see that it is a rock.

[7:38] And it's bizarre to think about, right? A world without light. Light, no life, no sight, none of that without light. So here Jesus is. He's saying, I am the light of the world.

[7:51] He's saying, in me is abundant life. And it's only in my light that anyone can see rightly and truthfully. And man, that's a pretty radical claim, right? It's a pretty radical claim.

[8:02] Last week, we heard about how the Jewish people wanted to stone him for invoking the divine name, I am who I am. But this week, he's saying something pretty radical, too.

[8:12] That he is the light of the world, the very source of life. And the only light by which we can see truthfully, truly, and rightly. Or in other words, what he's saying in no man's words is that without me, even if you think you're alive, you're actually dead.

[8:29] Without me, even if you think that you can see just fine, you're actually blind and in the dark. And this is the provocative, even offensive claim that we are confronted with today from John's gospel.

[8:41] I am the light of the world. It's a challenge. A challenge to all the other gods, all the other sources of light that we might be tempted to trust in and hope in. See, with these I am statements, what John's gospel is trying to accomplish, what John is trying to do is he's trying to lift up Jesus as a superior God, a superior deity.

[9:00] So far superior to all the other gods of all the other nations. So when Jesus says, I am the light of the world, John is making explicit that Jesus is not just the I am, Yahweh.

[9:11] He's making explicit that Jesus is a better God than Ra of Egypt, right? That God that Yahweh conquered when he sent the plague of darkness upon Egypt and delivered his people out of slavery.

[9:24] Or in the Greek world, John was saying, Jesus, when he says, I am the light of the world, he's superior to Apollo, right? The son of Zeus, the God of light and sun. See, the message of John's gospel is that Jesus is God among us and he is not just the true God, but he's better.

[9:41] He's better than any other God. And I think this is very instructive for us, especially for those of us investigating Christianity. You know, I think sometimes with our rationalistic, you know, modernistic mindsets, we can get stuck on the question, is Jesus true?

[9:56] And this is an important question that I hope we all wrestle with. I hope we all check the evidence. I hope we all try to be as objective as possible and examine all these claims. But the beauty of the good news about Jesus is not only has God given himself objectively to us to examine as credible and true, but he's also subjectively compelling.

[10:18] He's also subjectively compelling. I want you to imagine if Greek mythology were true, right? Imagine if that were true. It wouldn't be satisfying, right?

[10:30] Would you really want a God like Zeus? Would you really want a God like Apollo or Hermes, right? Or Aphrodite? But the good news of Jesus is that he's not only objectively true, but he is also subjectively compelling and satisfying better than any other option.

[10:47] So for those of us who are investigating Christianity here today, even those of us who might just struggle with consistent doubt and skepticism, maybe you're in a season of deconstruction, we're super glad you're here.

[11:01] And what I want to propose to you is that, yes, keep grappling with that question, is Jesus true? Is this true? But I also want to challenge you to grapple with the question, is this better?

[11:12] Is this more beautiful, more compelling than any other alternative I might place my faith in and give my life to? And I think that if we dare to ask this question, is Jesus better?

[11:26] I wonder if we might be pleasantly surprised at the way that our Heavenly Father draws us to himself, the way his Spirit persuades us about who Jesus is objectively and subjectively, as the one who truly is better.

[11:43] Now, one way we might consider if Jesus is better is by asking, does he give us a better story? Does he make better sense of the world and reality around us?

[11:53] And I think Jesus is getting at this when he says, I am the light of the world. I think he's wanting to speak to that question, is he better? Does he give us a better story? You know how a lot of people love to quote Dr. King, right?

[12:06] Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. People love that, right? Religious people love that. Irreligious people love that. Agnostics, atheists, we all love that story.

[12:18] We all want to believe in that story, right? That ends in injustice and goodness and light triumphing. But when Jesus says, I am the light of the world, what he's saying is that the story of universal history ending in justice, it's only possible because he says, I am the light of the world.

[12:38] See, when Jesus says, I am the light of the world, he's retelling the story of the universe. We're taking all the way back to the beginning of history. Page one of your Pew Bibles, Genesis chapter one, verse one.

[12:49] In the beginning, God created what? The heavens and the earth. And then what does it say in the very next verse? Verse two. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness.

[13:00] Darkness was over the surface of the deep. And I want you to think about that for a second. God, the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, has existed from all eternity in his own unapproachable light, right?

[13:15] But when he decided to create, when he decided to bring into existence something other than himself, that was the moment when darkness, formlessness, emptiness, and the potential for chaos and evil came to be, when God made something other than himself, something that was not God.

[13:34] It seems a little precarious, right? Yet from the beginning, this God, who is the inspiration of light itself as we know it, he was not at all threatened. He was not at all threatened by the darkness of what he created.

[13:47] His spirit from the beginning was hovering over the deep, dark waters, giving order to it, conquering it, giving it purpose and meaning and beauty. And with a simple word, God put darkness in its place, right?

[14:00] And God said, let there be light. And this light was the life of mankind, the light that dispelled the darkness. It brought the beginnings of order and form and life and vitality to this world.

[14:11] And this is how the beautiful story of creation began. In the beginning, God made the world and said, let there be light. And we were meant to live in creation by his light.

[14:23] And to know and relate to this world in his pure and powerful light that conquered the initial darkness. But see, what the fall of history is, the fall of creation, is when the crown of God's creation, humanity, us, made in God's image, dependent upon God's light for knowledge and life.

[14:42] The fall was when we chose to walk in darkness outside of God's light. The fall was the result of us reintroducing and actualizing the possibilities of emptiness and chaos back into creation.

[14:58] And what was the result? The result, as Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans, was that our sinful hearts were darkened because we exchanged the truth about God for a lie. And we even began to suppress the truth about God.

[15:10] And see, that's the big predicament that we're in. That's exactly why we need the divine light once again. So you see, this story that Jesus is telling, this story that he's inserting himself into when he says, I am the light of the world, he's saying that though you rejected the initial light of creation that I gave to this world, though you let darkness back in, I'm entering into this dark world to shine again the light of new creation.

[15:40] I'm shining the light of new creation, he says. He's saying, I've come to bring new life and to help you see rightly again. To rescue you, as Paul says, from the dominion of darkness and to bring you into the kingdom of the sun, the kingdom of light.

[15:55] He's saying, I've come to get you to the happy ending of the story. A story that begins and ends with a triumph of divine light. John writes about this in the very last chapter of the Bible, Revelation chapter 22.

[16:08] He writes of a city with no more tears, no more darkness, no more night, and in no need of a lamp or even the sun, for it says the Lord God will give it its light and he'll reign forever.

[16:20] History ends with God's people who once chose and walked in darkness, somehow still dwelling with him at the end in unapproachable light. And that's the good news that Jesus came to bring as the light of the world.

[16:31] And John and Jesus, they both want us to end up enjoying that happy ending to the story and the final defeat of darkness. But the question is, will we walk by faith in his light?

[16:44] Will we walk by faith in his light into his abundant life? You know, the context in which Jesus says this statement, I am the light of the world, what's going on here in the Gospel of John is something called the Feast of Tabernacles, the Festival of Tabernacles.

[17:00] And what that was was a celebration of how God provided for his people as they wandered out of Egypt in the wilderness. And what they would do, what they would do during the Feast of Tabernacles is they would camp out.

[17:14] They would camp out for a whole week in booths and just remember how God took care of them as they were tent dwellers all throughout the wilderness. And then at the temple, four huge lamps would be lit up at the temple court and people would dance and sing and hold burning torches and they would remember the light that led them out of Egypt into the Promised Land.

[17:35] They would remember the pillar of fire that led them through the wilderness by night. And so the point Jesus is making here by saying, I am the light of the world, the point he's making as he's about to give sight to this man born blind and as he's about to confront the Pharisees is that we are all in the dark.

[17:53] We are all in the dark. We are all in the wilderness. We are all blinded by sin. And it's only through him, the light of the world, that we can enter into life and light and sight.

[18:05] So I want to look at this story now with the next half of what I got to say. I want to look at how Jesus makes this point about how we're all in darkness, how we're all blind, how we are all in the wilderness.

[18:17] I want to see how Jesus, he really executes a real life living parable here as he heals this man born blind. And I love how it begins. Look with me at how it begins.

[18:28] If you remember from last week, Jesus was just about to get stoned at the temple because he had invoked the divine name and claimed it for himself. And you might expect that the very next thing that he was going to do was go find some security, go find a place to hide.

[18:42] But here in chapter 9, verse 1, what does it say? As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. He sees a man blind from birth.

[18:54] I love that. Remember, he is the God of Abraham. He's the God of Hagar. He's the God who sees. And he sees rightly, and he sees compassionately. And seeing rightly and compassionately, he saw what no one else saw.

[19:08] Imagine the whole world probably blind to this blind man, this man blind from birth. Imagine a whole world so used to seeing him beg, so used to his plight, so used to his suffering, that they could have never even imagined a different life for him.

[19:25] I think about it. How did everyone know that this man was blind from birth? They must have seen him and have been familiar with him and his story for years, maybe decades. They all, including Jesus' disciples, simply got used to it.

[19:40] And as we see in the story, many of these people, they couldn't even believe that he was the same guy after his eyes were opened, right? They didn't have eyes to see.

[19:51] But when all of Jerusalem, all these pious worshipers, passed by him and saw his suffering, and yet really didn't see him at all, Jesus saw him.

[20:02] Because Jesus saw a man that he wanted to display the works of God in. And because Jesus saw him, his life was changed forever.

[20:13] His life was changed forever. Now again, the disciples, they saw him, but they didn't really see him, right, with the proper lighting. Really, they didn't see him as anything other than an occasion to have an intriguing theological discussion, a theological debate.

[20:26] They don't ask, Rabbi, what amazing thing are you about to do for this guy? What amazing thing are you going to do to bring glory to your Father in heaven? In verse 2, they ask, Rabbi, who sinned?

[20:38] This man or his parents, that he was born blind? Now they must have thought they were being so clever. They must have thought they were being so theologically astute, because everyone knows that suffering is a result of sin, right?

[20:52] That was their premise. And yet this man was born suffering from blindness. So like, did he do something? Maybe like in the womb? Or was his suffering linked to someone else's sin?

[21:05] Maybe like his parents. In essence, what they were asking was, is this man suffering as a perpetrator of sin or as a victim of sin? Who's at fault?

[21:16] Who's to blame? But Jesus, being the light of the world, seeing truly, seeing past this false, foolish dichotomy that seeks to blame people and pin people in darkness, he says in verse 3, neither.

[21:31] Neither. Neither did this man nor his parents sin, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Jesus sheds further light on the story of this blind man.

[21:47] A far more nuanced light than simply attributing his blindness to his own sin or someone else's sin, Jesus says, neither. Because he knows the truth. That the relationship between sin and suffering is way more complex, right?

[22:01] It's way more complex than this. As scripture teaches, like in the book of Job, or as Jesus taught elsewhere in Luke chapter 13 about the 18 people who got crushed by a tower, and he talked about whether they were more guilty than the survivors.

[22:13] No, they weren't. Scripture teaches, Jesus confirms, that while all suffering is due to sin in general, not every instance of suffering is directly related and simply due to a particular instance of sin, like some tit-for-tat karmic formula.

[22:31] And honestly, this exchange warrants a sermon of its own, and I was tempted to just preach on this, but I decided not to. If you want, you can look at a sermon we preached last year, Luke chapter 13, where he talks about the tower that fell on those 18 people.

[22:45] Or you could read Tim Keller's book, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. It's one of my favorites. But in the interest of time and wanting to get, wanting to keep the big picture of what's going on here, I love what the Oxford New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, he says about Jesus' response to this blind man and his disciples' simplistic question.

[23:04] N.T. Wright says, Jesus didn't waste time describing the chaos, analyzing it, or discussing whose fault it was. Instead, he created light.

[23:15] Instead, he just created light. Jesus' answer was basically that you guys are missing the point, trying to figure out who is to blame. The main point is that I am the light of the world.

[23:27] And every instance of suffering is not an occasion to discern where the darkness came from and who's to blame. Rather, every instance of suffering is an occasion for me to display the works of God.

[23:39] And maybe this is a word for some of us today who find ourselves in a season of suffering. Maybe some of us feel guilty, ashamed of ourselves for the suffering we believe that we're responsible for because of past mistakes and flaws and failures.

[23:55] Or maybe some of us feel like victims, angry at others, our parents, our family, our spouse, our community, maybe even at God for the suffering we believe we've been unfairly afflicted with.

[24:08] And you know, maybe you're not wrong. Maybe we are responsible for our suffering or maybe others are responsible for our suffering. But what if? Imagine what kind of people, what kind of community we would be.

[24:19] What if we saw ourselves not simply as guilty or as victims, but more importantly as people on whom God wants to shine his transformative life-giving light.

[24:30] How might that bring the transcendent healing and reconciliation that we and this whole world need? This is what happened to the man blind from birth after his encounter with Jesus.

[24:42] He didn't need an answer to why he was blind in the first place. He didn't even need a detailed rational explanation for how exactly he came to see all of a sudden for the first time in his life. All of a sudden his life became a story with Jesus at the center as his life transforming Savior, as his life transforming light.

[25:03] All of a sudden his whole life became about what Jesus had done for him. When his neighbors and the Pharisees all continued to ask him what happened and how he gained his sight, all he could say was that this man named Jesus did it.

[25:17] When the Pharisees pushed and pushed to get him to explain how someone who supposedly broke the Sabbath by making mud on the day he was supposed to rest, how he could heal him like that, all this man could say in verse 25 was whether he's a sinner or not, I don't know.

[25:32] one thing I do know. I was blind but now I see. That's all he cared to know. That's all he had to know.

[25:44] I don't know how it worked, why he spit on the ground and made mud and put that on my face. I don't know why he told me to go to this pool, Siloam. And by the way, most commentators don't really know either.

[25:57] I don't know. But what I know is that I was blind and now I see. This was his truth. This was his truth and this is what he was sticking to and nothing else mattered.

[26:11] For this man who had only ever known darkness, Jesus had become his light, the light of the world. And as it says in verse 38, he placed all his faith in Jesus and he fell down and he worshipped him.

[26:24] And again, this is the real life parable, the real life picture Jesus used to explain what it meant that he is the light of the world. I mean, just try to explain, try to imagine, try to think through the details of this story.

[26:37] This guy has been in the dark his whole life, right? He doesn't have a clue what light even is. The word color or red or green or purple, it means nothing to him.

[26:49] And he's going about his daily routine just trying to helplessly beg for charity. And then from some direction, maybe he hears the judgmental, dehumanizing questions of the disciples about, hey Jesus, who sinned?

[27:04] Who sinned to make that guy blind? No doubt he's probably wondered the same thing, right? Why me, God? What did I do? Or why did you let this happen to me?

[27:16] And then all of a sudden he hears this rabbi give a crazy surprising answer that neither he nor his parents' sin led to his blindness, but that the work of God was about to be displayed somehow and whatever that meant.

[27:33] And all of a sudden he hears right? He hears someone spit on the ground. He feels some mud on his eyes and he's given some strange and maybe even inconvenient instructions to go wash in this certain pool in the city.

[27:48] And so just imagine this blind guy, he's still blind with mud on his face. He's groping around trying to make his way to this pool called Siloam with mud on his face, right?

[27:59] And he's trying to get to this pool so that he could clean up, not knowing, not knowing what's going to happen. Jesus didn't even say, right? But hey, he's got nothing better to do and he's got mud on his face, he's got to get it off so he's going, right?

[28:12] But then imagine as soon as he washed in the pool, as soon as the mud came off his eyes, try to imagine that moment, right?

[28:24] the transformation there. Imagine everything he must have thought, everything he must have felt as he gained sight for the first time ever.

[28:34] It's hard to even fathom, right? The experience of never having been able to see and then suddenly seeing for the first time, I mean, it's almost like, it's almost like a new birth. It's almost like the beginning of new life.

[28:47] Maybe the first thing he sees is the water in the pool at Siloam. Maybe he sees his own reflection, does he even know that it's him? Does he even know what a reflection is?

[28:59] Everything is new. Everything is changed. Maybe everything is confusing, but you've got to believe that with this new sensation, everything is also unimaginably exciting and life-giving and transformative and awe-inspiring.

[29:14] Have you ever seen those videos of colorblind people getting those special glasses, where they put them on and then all of a sudden they're just weeping. They're just weeping because they're seeing the world in a whole new way and brilliance like they've never seen before.

[29:31] Well, this is like a million times, a gazillion times more amazing than that. This guy can see his parents' faces for the first time. He can walk back home without a cane or assistance.

[29:44] He no longer has to beg for a living. Unlike before, he can now literally taste and see that the Lord is good. He's a brand new man delivered from darkness by the light of the world, Jesus Christ.

[30:00] And because of this encounter with Jesus and by faith in this true light of the world, this guy who is only seen for maybe a couple minutes, maybe a couple hours, he now sees better than the most learned, the most studied, educated, and respected teachers of his community.

[30:16] All because he now sees according to the light of the world because of Jesus. And this is where I want to end the sermon today with the Pharisees. Now the Pharisees, they didn't have that, you know, self-righteous, judgmental, hypocritical reputation in their society that we so easily identify them with in our colloquial speech.

[30:36] They were really trying to save Israel. They believed what the prophets said, that Israel had gone into exile because they failed to observe the law. And what the Pharisees wanted to do was they wanted to save the nation by obeying the law and pressuring everyone else to obey the law.

[30:52] If anyone saw clearly the truth about God and the world, it was these guys who were experts who knew and studied the law of Moses. And yet in Jesus' real life parable, while everyone can clearly see the work of God, this man born blind, he knows what's happened, his neighbors see it, his parents see it, well, none of them can deny the transformation brought about by the light of the world into this man's life.

[31:19] The supposedly righteous Pharisees, they remained blind. They remained blind because they could not see Jesus for who he really was. And this is the point, Jesus' parable, his miracle, it ends in.

[31:34] Verse 39, Jesus said, for judgment, I have come into the world so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind. Claiming to be wise, the Pharisees, they became fools.

[31:48] Claiming to see, they proved themselves blind. And therefore, according to verse 41, claiming to be innocent, they proved themselves to actually be guilty. And I just want to say, isn't that a scary thing?

[32:01] The scary thing is that they were so sure. These were experts in the law of Moses. And as a preacher, this terrifies me.

[32:13] These guys were so sure that they were right. Why? How could I come up here with any kind of confidence? These guys studied way more than me, I'm sure.

[32:25] Speaking to the healed man in verse 28, this is how sure they were. They said, you are this fellow's disciple. We are disciples of Moses. We know that God spoke to Moses.

[32:38] But as for this fellow, we don't even know where he comes from. And you know, this was precisely the problem. They identified with the law of Moses, yet they ironically, they ironically did not identify with the very word of God, Jesus Christ, the light of the world.

[32:57] They failed to see the shadow of Christ in the law of Moses. They failed to see the whole point of the law. The whole point of the law was not self-salvation through obedience and adherence. The whole point of the law was to point out our slavery to the dominion of darkness and our need for the light of the world.

[33:13] The law was not meant to divide good people from bad people. But as the missionary and commentator Leslie Newbigin writes, the proper distinction is between those who acknowledge their blindness and those who don't.

[33:27] See, the whole point of this real-life parable is the sobering truth that we can think we see. We can be so sure and yet be blind and in the dark all along.

[33:40] The Pharisees were so sure they were upholding God's law against Jesus. The medieval European crusaders were so sure they were standing for God's kingdom when they slaughtered thousands, millions of Muslims.

[33:55] Vladimir Putin is so sure that his violent invasion of Ukraine is justified and even in accord with his Russian Orthodox Christianity. But they were, they are, all terribly wrong.

[34:09] And we could be wrong about so many things too. None of us is immune to darkness. None of us is immune to the blindness. I'm not. Neither is Jonathan nor the Pope were your favorite podcaster, your favorite journalist, your favorite politician.

[34:26] None of us. We're all fallible and finite in this broken, darkened world. Well then, you might be thinking, to whom shall we go?

[34:37] Who then can we trust? Are we bound for a life of endless deconstruction and just perpetual skepticism? Is that the application of this sermon?

[34:48] To just doubt everything? Be skeptical for the rest of your life. Trust nothing. Is that the application that we shouldn't trust ourselves because we could always be wrong? Are we left in the dark forever?

[35:00] Well, it's to that question that Jesus' word to us today is, I am the light of the world. It's a claim that absolutely humbles us and gives us the confidence we need to live life to the fullest.

[35:15] See, when he says, I am the light of the world, it means that yes, we could be wrong about a lot of things, even most things, even the most important things. And therefore, we must always maintain a posture of humility because Jesus alone is the light of the world.

[35:31] We must always be ready to take the logs out of our own eyes before trying to take the specks out of other people's eyes. But I am the light of the world doesn't just mean that I could be wrong about a whole lot of things.

[35:44] I am the light of the world also means that there is truth that God wants us to know and to see and to live and depend upon. And while we can be wrong about many things, we can trust in the light of the world.

[35:59] We can trust in Jesus Christ. And though we could never, though we could never be the source of truth and light, as the moon reflects the sun, so can we relate to Christ, the light of the world, declaring with the heavens his glory.

[36:17] And Christ Church, this is the gospel. This is the gospel that though we were in darkness and though we could see no light, the good news is that we don't have to supply our own light.

[36:28] We don't have to be the source of our own light, but that the unconquerable light of the world, the I am, has graciously entered into our darkness as the light of the world, even hanging upon a cross for three hours in the dark in order to bring us the light of life, hope, and truth that we all so desperately need.

[36:52] This is the gospel. Jesus Christ is the light of the world. Will you pray with me? Lord, would you open our eyes to our blindness?

[37:10] Would you dispel our darkness? Would we trust in you as the light of the world? Would we see ourselves in this blind man?

[37:23] Would we see ourselves in the Pharisees, even refusing to acknowledge all the ways that we could conceivably be wrong before you? We thank you that we don't have to be our own lights.

[37:38] We thank you that your son has come to give us the light that we need. We ask that you help us to trust him, to bear wonderful witness to this incomparable light better than any other, we pray in his name.

[37:52] Amen. Amen. Amen.