"Whoever says, 'I am in the light,' while hating a brother or
sister is still in the darkness. Whoever loves a brother or sister lives
in the light, and in such a person there is no cause for stumbling. But
whoever hates another believer is in the darkness, walks in the darkness, and
does not know the way to go, because the darkness has brought blindness." [1 John 2:9-11]
My grandfather used to say, "Walk like you're going
somewhere." As that little proverb was interpreted to me over the
years, his point was always quite literally about walking--as in, when
you are walking, you should be efficient, purposeful, focused, at a pace that
gets you to your destination. My grandfather was not a saunterer,
and would not have looked kindly on moseying. The
walk-like-you're-going-somewhere philosophy of travel was always about being
purposeful and intentional: the point of walking was to get where you were
going. He was not a competitive runner or racer--so the efficiency
business was never about trying to be faster than someone else or to win a
prize. It was more about focus--if you're going to walk, walk,
and go where you're going, I think he would have said.
The first Christians kept coming back to the picture of their lives as a
walk.
"Christ was raised from the dead," Paul said to the Romans, "so
that we might walk in newness of life."
And in fact, throughout the New Testament a good number of Bible translations
will just put the word "live" where the original Greek uses the verb
"walk," because the metaphor of walking=living was so well-worn for
the early church. And here in 1 John, we get more of this walking
business, too. John talks about the how and the where of walking (i.e., living), and whether we are walking
"in the light" or "in the darkness."
But why does he ask? What's the interest underneath the
question? Given the culture in which we live--a vote-the-loser-off-the-island
way of seeing the world--we might think John is interested in dividing up the
world, or the church, into piles for final judgment. There are the
"in the light" people, who are clearly heaven-bound, we would
venture. And there are the "in the darkness" people, who are
not so lucky--is that about right? We are tempted to hear this "in
the darkness" and "in the light" business as the issuing of a
final verdict, a description of who are the winners and who are the losers in
some kind of salvation race.
But that's not really the way John talks here. He doesn't seem to be
giving final verdicts so much as giving
present-moment diagnoses. And the point of a diagnosis,
as opposed to an autopsy, of course, is to offer a course of action to remedy what is sick or diseased. John is interested
in getting his readers to "walk like they are going somewhere," which
is to say, to be mindful and purposeful in the ways they live. He is not
interested in refereeing a race or holding time trials--in other words, this is
not about competition or comparison between people (who's a better
Christian than whom? Who's a true Christian compared to whom?
That sort of thing), but about getting people who are limping and stumbling
along to walk rightly, the way they were intended to all along.
John describes what it looks like to walk in the darkness and to walk in the
light, not so that we can label our friends or co-workers or fellow church
members once and for all as "good eggs" and "bad eggs," but
rather so that we can all be corrected when we are off the path or have lost
the right pace or have started to limp.
In other words, when we find someone else is "walking in
darkness"--which John equates with refusal to love--there is every hope
that he or she can be brought back "into the light"--that is, back
into the practice of Christ-like love. And at the very same time, when
someone else helps me to see that I have been "walking in darkness"
and refusing to love the people put into my life, there is every hope that I
will be brought back to walking rightly again. When I'm no longer
"walking like I'm going somewhere," I need those other voices to get
my pace back in step with the one I am following. When I fall away from
loving the community of believers that God has placed in my life, I will depend
on that community to help pull me back--to retrain my feet, you could say, and
to learn to stop tripping over myself.
It would be so easy for us to start labeling people as beyond hope--as
irredeemably "walking in darkness"--or to get comfortably complacent
with ourselves and insist that we are "walking in the light" and
therefore don't need others to help keep us in the way of Jesus. But John
insists that we are always on the move--always in motion following Jesus, and
that will mean there is always the opportunity to be led back into love and out
of "darkness" along the way. Today, we have the opportunity to walk like we
are going somewhere by practicing real love for the real people who
cross our paths today.
Lord Jesus, keep us walking in the light, and keep us gracious as we
seek to keep one another walking after you, too, while we entrust ourselves to
their guidance, too.
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