2nd week in Easter, Wednesday – 22nd April 2020 — Gospel: John 3, 16-21
Need for an openness to realities
God’s way of loving the world was to send the Son to save it. Jesus is God’s expression of love and longing. The light comes to find us, to illumine our path for our sake, because God wants us. God reaches out through the Son with the sheer purpose of sharing everlasting life with us. Indeed, the coming of the Son into the world illuminates numerous pairs of contrasting realities (3,19-21): between believers and non-believers, saved and condemned, people who love darkness rather than light, do evil and doing what is true. These opposites express the contrasting ways to God’s own goal and longing. Indeed, we encounter these sharp divisions as characteristics of John’s Gospel. In John 3, Nicodemus seeks Jesus by night, who later reappears in 19,39 to help care for Jesus’ body. He has emerged from darkness into light over the course of Jesus’ ministry. In the case of Samaritan woman in John 4, whose long conversation with Jesus ends in a cautious belief, far from where she first began. Similarly of the blind man in John 9, whose move from darkness to light happens rather quickly in physiological terms, but more slowly in terms of identifying Jesus. John tells us that the intense contrast between believing and not believing, darkness and light, and evil and truth are descriptions of realities. But they are not the process by which human beings come to recognize truth, light, life, and God’s own son.
