I AM the Light of The World

John 8:12, “I AM the light of the world.” The preceding context: A woman is forcefully brought before Jesus and thrown to the ground. Humiliated. Shamed. Caught. Guilty. Exposed. As the men discuss her pending death, she lies on the dusty ground trying to cover her nakedness, as she has been pulled from her lover’s bed guilty of adultery. Her man is not on trial. He is not as important in this power grab the religious leaders are using to trap Jesus into either declaring his heresy (the law of Moses should not be obeyed, and the woman aquited) or a criminal (in disobeying the Romans in carrying out the execution). Emerge the famous words, “He who has no sins, can cast the first stone.”

All at once with those words everyone stands in the same shoes. The woman and the religious leaders are in the exact same condition: guilty. Guilty not by some relative standard of religious righteousness. Guilty by the standard of the Holy One.

I AM the Light of the World.

In Christ, our lives stand exposed. Bonhoeffer says that “man only knows who he is in the light of God.”  All of our hiding, all of our masks, all of our self-righteousness falls away because the Holy One, the great I AM WHO I AM judges our lives. There is a certain agony to this kind of exposing light. I would much rather lurk in the shadows than come clean about my issues. I would much rather shirk back in shame, than confess what the light exposes.

But in this agonizing light comes freedom as John chapter 8 leads us to these words of freedom, “then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”