Despite eating thousands of carrots over the course of my lifetime, I still cannot see in the dark. It turns out that I need some sort of light to see where I am going and where things are. My ankles, knees and furniture can attest to this truth whenever I get up in the middle of the night to visit the toilet. In fact, everything we can see is as a result of light from some source reaching our eyes. If there was no light, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. Light serves this purpose of illuminating things for us. Because of a light shining, we can see where things are and where we need to go. It’s this sort of analogy that Jesus is giving us in our reading this week.
As He continues with His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells His disciples that they are light. Just as He has come into the world to illuminate us as to who God is, so disciples are to live in such a way that they show God’s light to the world. He goes on to explain that the Law that was given to Israel was a revelation as to God’s character and serves the purpose of showing us how God wants us to live. It is by seeing how we live, compared to how God wants us to live, that we can see where we are going wrong, and where we need to go right. So, as the Law revealed some of God’s character to us, now Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, and in Him we are given illumination as to how we are meant to live.
Like last week, it all comes down to how we are living. There’s little point knowing how God wants us to live if we don’t actually live that way ourselves. To know what Jesus calls us to do yet not to do it is pointless. Like a lamp under a bowl, if we don’t show this way of life then how can people see how things are meant to be? Simply knowing how things are meant to be without changing who we are makes us into Pharisees. Jesus calls us to live the same life that He lived. In doing this we shine God’s light across the world and others can see this new way of living and see how much better it is. By agreeing to follow Jesus we agree to do as He did. As Jesus shows us how God calls us to live, so by our lives do we show others this. May our lives, lived for God, shine God’s love into a dark world and show others the path they need to take.