Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.

 

Saturday, July 29, 2023


Psalm 69:1-16

2 Samuel 8:15-9:13

John 8:12-30


Observance: Mary and Martha of Bethany


Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness.


Australian sports journalist Martin Flanagan was interviewed on the radio this week because of a book he has recently published about his experience as a schoolboy in a school riddled with child sexual abuse. The effect it had on his later life was described as a descent into madness and misery. It was so terrible that he found common ground with older men who were suffering from the experience of fighting in war. He made a comment that stuck out: as part of coming out of the shame and into a place of grace, he recounted something said to him said by an Anglican priest, that life is like finding your way through a dark room.


Looking up and out at the world around us, it seems reasonable for so many humans to give up and give in to nihilism. There is no such thing as “the good life”. Everything is stained with some sort of tragedy: the man enjoying his day off with a walk in the park only has one leg. The friends off to the pub to enjoy pension day have their car break down on them in the middle of an intersection. The sole family provider and grandmother feels the need to excuse and explain her reasons for accessing the church food bank. We are all stumbling around in a dark room trying to find our way.


Perhaps the reason why Jesus is asked by the crowd for proof to support His claim that He is the light of the world is because we have stumbled into the furniture of this dark room of life so many times. We’ve got two feet full of stubbed toes, and now this Jesus comes along and says, Follow me, I know the way.


His greatest words of assurance come from the fact that He identifies Himself as the great “I Am”. When He says this, He is self-identifying as “I Am Who I Am”, the God of the Burning Bush who spoke to Moses. That is to say, we can trust Jesus to know the way, because He is the creator God who made it all. And this creator God did not make our life a maze and then just leave us to stumble in the dark: He is here to lead us through it.

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