In Him Was Life (John 1.1-5)

Introduction

Have you ever looked up at the sky after sunset; perhaps on a balmy summer’s night, or maybe on a frosty winter’s evening? You can pick out some constellations quite easily; Orion with its distinctive belt of three stars - and the Plough maybe. You can usually pick out the North Star if you know roughly where to look and maybe one or two others - like Sirius, usually just above the horizon, and the brightest object in the night sky apart from the Moon.

(By the way, somebody once went up to John McEnroe and introduced himself as the brightest star of them all and John McEnroe said, “You cannot be Sirius!”

They say that about 6,000 individual stars are visible from the Earth with the naked eye. But that is of course only a very tiny fraction of all the suns that exist in the universe.

In fact, they think that there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, the Milky Way, which measures 100,000 light-years across. That’s a lot of chocolate! But confectionery aside, what I’ve just said means that light, travelling at 186,000 miles/second, takes 100,000 years to get from one end of our galaxy to the other. Actually, on the macro scale, the Milky Way is just a walk around the block. They reckon that there are 200 billion galaxies like our Milky Way in the observable universe!

Put another way, how many grains of sand do you think there are on planet Earth? You’d have to use words ending with “illion” - like zillion, bazillion, squillion and kazillion to arrive at the number of grains of sand there in all the deserts, beaches, sandpits and egg-timers on our planet. Not to mention all that sand between your toes after a day out with the kids at Saltburn. It’s a lot of sand.

Well apparently, for every grain of sand there is on the Earth there are about a million stars in the universe.

And, when you gaze up into the cloudless night sky, do you look and begin to wonder? The universe, you, life itself, how we all got here, where it all came from, and is there anything, or anyone, out there beyond us?

In the Beginning…

Those are the sorts of questions the Apostle John was asking when he sat down to write his gospel. How did this all happen? Where does it all come from?  What’s it all made of? How did it get here? How did we get here? And he took a pen and jotted down some simple sentences; “In the beginning was the Word.”

When you go back all the way to the point when it all began, Jesus was already there. And he is the Word; because he is absolutely clear and always true.

The gospels say over and over that people sat up and listened whenever Jesus opened his mouth because he spoke with authority. It was nothing like the usual hot air from their rambling religious leaders.

He is the Word. They tried to trap him every time he walked into the public sphere and without fail he tied them up in knots with razor-sharp words of wisdom. He never withdrew anything he said because he never needed to, he never had to apologise, he never changed his mind, he never hesitated, and he never lied.

He is the Word. Everything he said was 100% the truth.

·       He said he would go to Jerusalem and he went.

·       He said he would suffer many things and he did.

·       He said he’d be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and he was.

·       He said they would mock him, spit on him and kill him and they did.

·       He said after three days he’d rise again and up from the grave he rose on the third day!

He is the Word. He only had to open his mouth and raging storms were instantly calmed. With a simple command from his lips, fig trees withered, all manner of sickness was cured, demons were sent packing and even the dead were raised. People marvelled. “Who is this man” they asked? They’d never seen anything like it.

He is the Word. In Romans 4.17 it says that he gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not. He only needs to say one word over your life and things begin to shift. Abundant life springs out of utter hopelessness at the sound of his voice. No wonder John called Jesus the Word!

And listen, he is speaking today. Think of all the incomprehensible waffle you have to scroll through and ignore just to update the software on your mobile phone. But just one word from Jesus today can change everything in your world. He is the Word.

As I said last week, but for the benefit of those who were away, the Word is our English translation of the Greek word logos from which we get words like “logic.” Because of Jesus, life, the universe and everything is understandable – we can make logical sense of it. Because of Jesus, we can actually see who we really are and begin to get a feel for what God is like.

…He Was With God and He Was God

Verses 1-2 tell us two things about Jesus – he was with God in the beginning and he was God in the beginning. Christians believe that there is one God, in three persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is distinct from the other, and each is equally - and fully - divine. The human mind does not have the room to grasp this.

It is incomprehensible to us. It is too elevated and wonderful for us to understand. God’s ways are not our ways and his thoughts are higher than ours.

Saint Augustine wrote fifteen volumes on the Trinity, can you imagine that? 15 separate but related books on the Trinity before he summed up with one of the most profound and exact statements which have ever been made about the triune God. Yet even he never got anywhere near to plumbing the full depths of the mysteries of the God who is Three in One. You just can’t bottle God in a jar and put a label on him.

In v3 it says “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

I mentioned just now the gargantuan magnitude of the heavens which point to the fact that we have a very great God, because he holds it all together. I could also speak about the infinitesimal constructions of the subatomic world which point to the fact that he meticulously orders the building blocks of matter.

Any learned professor would tell you, with eyes full of wonder, how implausible it is that life anywhere ever came to be at all, such are the overwhelming odds against it being possible. The laughably improbable existence of the universe points to the existence of a wise author who conceived it and called it into being. “Through him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made.”

I have spent about an hour this week following the progress of the Japanese Atatsuki orbiter that has successfully managed to start circling Venus and sending back data about it. (Is anyone aware by the way that a JAXA probe is now orbiting Venus? Well it is!)

Last week, I positively salivated for two hours over high resolution photos of Pluto just sent back from the New Horizons probe. We are the first generation of humans to see these things.

And when the Philae lander touched down on comet 67P last year, I nearly wet myself with excitement.

But space exploration only reveals the fantastic variety of what’s already there. It doesn’t shed any light on what anything actually means.

It gives you the ‘what’ and the ‘how’, but not the ‘why’. The ‘what’ tells you the number of stars up there (give or take a few trillion). The ‘how’ tells you how far away they are. But the ‘why’ – why it was they burst into existence, from nothing, belongs to God, who brought it all about by speaking one word, his Word, the Word – the Lord Jesus Christ.

So in v4, the spotlight on Jesus intensifies. “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

People talk of soft light, bright light, indirect light, diffuse light, natural light... what sort of light is Jesus?

A little later in v9 (and Mark will speak about this next week) it says what the light of Christ is like. John describes Jesus as true light, or real light.

It’s not that Jesus is a bit like light. It’s the other way round. Light is very much like Jesus. Jesus was there before light existed. It was he who said, “Let there be light” and something a bit like him appeared. But it’s actually Jesus who is the true light, and the real thing.

What do we mean that Jesus is light?

I can think of four different ways in which Jesus is light. And I’m going to run through them briefly.

·         He is light that points to the Father.

·         He is light that exposes sin.

·         He is light that leads the way.

·         And he is light that casts out darkness.

Firstly, He is light that points to the Father.

The word logos is also the root of our word “logic” as I said. But it’s also where we get our word “logo” from; Jesus is God’s logo – his public face.

When you see a silhouette of a certain piece of fruit with a chunk bitten out, you immediately think “Apple” – pricey smartphones and tablets. When you see five interlocking circles you think “Olympic Games” - elite sport. When you see a castle under an arc of fairy dust, you think “Walt Disney” – family entertainment.

A logo is the visual identity of a brand. You see a logo, you think of what it embodies.

Well, Jesus is God’s logo. What you look at Jesus you see the Father. He is the image of the invisible God. He is the most vivid picture of God it is possible to see. As a logo embodies a brand, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. “Anyone who has seen me,” Jesus said, “has seen the Father.”

Secondly, Jesus is light that exposes sin.

Martin McVeigh was an unknown Roman Catholic priest in Northern Ireland until he led an information meeting for parents and pupils at a primary school in his parish in March 2012. When he put his memory stick into a laptop he didn’t realise that Windows AutoPlay was enabled on the computer. The horrified parents and children were shown not a presentation on Holy Communion but a slideshow of pornography. He protested his innocence and denied knowledge of how the pictures came to be there, but the bishop relieved him of his duties.

That’s extreme, but Jesus is a light that exposes sin in my life and yours. Mercifully, he usually exposes our sin to us and not others. He brings to the light of our conscience things now hidden in darkness.

Thirdly, he is light that leads the way. 

A few years ago, I was on holiday in Normandy. One night, I went outside to get some wood from the cellar for the log fire. There was no moon. It was pitch black. But I'd been to the cellar a few times before and I reckoned I’d be OK.

But there was a steep stairway going down to the cellar and, on second thoughts, I didn't want to risk it, so I thought better of it and I went back inside for a torch. When I came outside again, I saw that the steep drop was much closer than I had remembered it. And if I hadn't gone back for some light, I probably would have fallen 7 feet or so down the stone stairway.

Some people have no idea where they’re going in life. But we know what we mean when we say we can see light at the end of the tunnel after a difficult period in life. Because we know how Jesus leads the way through life.

And fourthly, he is the light that drives out darkness. 

...Which brings us to v5. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Everywhere you go in the world, you find rich and poor. Wealth has never eradicated poverty and poverty has never completely swallowed up wealth.

There’s a lot of misery and brokenness in the world but never so much that it completely extinguishes everyone else’s happiness. In every society there is always a mixture of both.

In almost every area of life, when opposites coexist, we cannot be sure which will come out on top. But light is different. No matter how many experiments you conduct, you never find darkness pushing back light. The one unchangeable property of darkness is that it must give way to light. Always.

That’s what John is saying about Jesus here. He means that Jesus is always greater than evil and will decisively defeat it.

Jonathan Aitken was a Member of Parliament, Cabinet minister and on the Privy Council. You may remember him. He was exposed as a serial liar in court, was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice and was handed an 18-month prison sentence. 

He’s written a book called “Pride and Perjury” and he says of that time in his life, “I went through the depths which encompassed defeat, disgrace, divorce, bankruptcy and jail - a royal flush of crises, especially as they all took place within the public eye.”

He had been tipped by some at one point to be a future Prime Minister. But his fall from grace was spectacular and permanent. He never entered politics again and is now unelectable given his past.

The thing is, we all have our darkness and we can all fall from grace. But that is not the focus of Christmas. It isn’t that Jesus has come as a child in Bethlehem to show us how bad we are and tell us to sharpen up our act. We know the truth about ourselves. We don’t need an accuser to rub it in. But light always overcomes darkness.

Jonathan Aitken found that out. This is what he said; “God is a God of new beginnings…  This dawned on me in a police cell waiting for a decision about whether they were going to charge me. For the first time I read Mark’s gospel from beginning to end, and I remember being overwhelmed by the power of the narrative and the Passion chapters. I began to see dimly there my own story.”

He came to faith in Jesus Christ and he now serves as a volunteer in a Christian prison-visiting ministry.

That’s what it means when it says about Jesus in v4 “In him was life, and that life was the light of all people.”

Ending

Jesus is light that points to the Father. Is it time to connect with the Father heart of God this morning? The Father who is there waiting for the prodigal sons and daughters to run back to the Father’s house?

Jesus is light that exposes sin. Is there something hidden that you need to bring out from the shame of darkness – where, undetected, it poisons your soul - into his laser-like healing light?

Jesus is light that leads the way. Are you hesitating about a big decision? Are you looking for direction in life? Are you fearful about stepping out in faith? Have you lost your way? Jesus said, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He said “Follow me.”

And Jesus is light that casts out darkness. Are you hemmed in by assaults on your soul? Deliver us from evil! Do you have panic attacks? Deliver us from evil! Are you stalked by doubts and temptations? Deliver us from evil!

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever, Amen!

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 13th December 2015