Let Your Light Shine
Day 264 – 21 September
Faith Goes on Foot
For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light. (Ephesians 5:8, NIV)
The School That Was Named After a Walk
Around 335 BC, a philosopher who had just come back to Athens set up shop in a public gymnasium on the edge of the city. Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen and so could not own property, which meant he could not found a school in any formal sense; he and his students simply gathered on the grounds of the Lyceum, among the gardens and the long colonnaded walkways that ran through it. Those covered walkways were called, in Greek, the peripatoi. And because that is where the group met and talked and argued, the school took its name from them: the Peripatos, and its members the Peripatetics, which is to say, in plain English, the walkers. There is a charming old story that the name came from Aristotle’s habit of lecturing while strolling up and down; the story may well be a later embroidery, and honest historians flag it as legend. But the name stuck, and it is a striking thing in itself. An entire school of thought, one that shaped Western science for two thousand years, ended up known not by a doctrine or a founder’s slogan, but by how its people went about. That is closer to the way the Bible measures a life than most of us realise.
Identity First, Then the Going
We met the opening of this verse three weeks ago, at the start of the month, and it said something staggering about who a believer now is: once darkness, and now light in the Lord. Today we take the clause that follows, the one that tells you what to do about it. “Live as children of light,” says the NIV, and with that translation a small treasure slips quietly out of sight. The Greek is περιπατεῖτε (peripateite, walk), an imperative from περιπατέω (peripateō, to walk about, to go around on foot), and the older English versions all keep it: walk as children of light. The NIV smooths it to live, which is not wrong, because that is exactly what the word came to mean; but smoothing it loses the picture, and the picture is the point. Notice also the order, because it is the order the whole gospel runs on. The command comes second. You are light in the Lord, and therefore walk that way. Nobody in this sentence is walking in order to become light; they are walking because they already are. The going is the family likeness of people who have been carried into the light, never the fare they pay for the journey.
The Walking Word
Once you see that verb, you start seeing it everywhere in this letter, because Paul cannot leave it alone. Seven times in six chapters he reaches for it. They once walked in trespasses; they are created for good works, that they should walk in them; they are urged to walk worthy of their calling; they must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk; they are to walk in love; to walk as children of light; and to walk carefully, as wise. One scholar sums up the letter by calling it Pauline halakhah, and that word is the key to the whole business. In the Hebrew world Paul came from, the verb הָלַךְ (halakh, to walk) was the ordinary way of describing how a person conducted their life, and the entire body of teaching about right conduct came to be called הֲלָכָה (halakhah), which means, quite literally, the walking. Enoch walked with God. Israel was told to walk in His ways. So when Paul writes to Greeks in Ephesus and tells them to walk as children of light, he is handing them a Hebrew habit of mind in a Greek word, and the habit is this: your faith is measured by your going. And the choice of picture matters enormously. A walk is not a leap. It is made of steps, ordinary ones, repeated, unspectacular, most of them unnoticed even by the walker. It happens at human pace, not at the speed of some heroic burst you could never sustain. And it goes somewhere; a walk has a direction, and a person who keeps walking arrives. Christians were called, at the very beginning and before anyone thought to call them Christians, people of the Way. Aristotle’s students were named for their walkways. The followers of Jesus were named for a road.
A Walk That Matches the Family
What kind of walking, then? Paul answers in the words immediately around this one: as children of light, τέκνα φωτός (tekna phōtos, children of light). The light is being described here as a lineage rather than a costume. You do not put it on in the morning and take it off at night; it is what you now are, and the walk is simply the family resemblance showing up in your feet. And Paul is refreshingly concrete about what that resemblance looks like. The very next line says that the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth. So a walk that matches the family is good, straight, and honest: kindness in the small transactions, uprightness where nobody is auditing you, truth spoken when a convenient blur would serve you better. That is not a mystical ambition. It is a description of how a person puts one foot in front of another through an ordinary Monday.
One Day’s Worth of Steps
Which is precisely the gift of this verse at the beginning of a week. The week ahead will not be leapt; it will be walked. You have roughly sixteen hours and several thousand steps in front of you, and the light you carry will show itself in the small repeated business of how you go: the tone you take at nine o’clock, what you do with the email that annoys you, whether you keep pace with the slow person beside you or leave them behind, the honesty of one small figure in one small report. None of that is dramatic, and none of it needs to be, because you were never asked to sprint. This is the week the arc turns to walking, and the first lesson is also the most freeing: you are not required to arrive today. You are required to go, in the light, one ordinary step after another, in company with the One who has never once walked away from you. Start where your feet are.
Declaration
My faith has feet, and today it takes about sixteen thousand steps. I am glad it works that way, because I have tried the leaping and it never lasted; what lasts is a day gone through well, and then another one. So I will not be measured by anything grand today. I will be measured by the going: by the tone I take when I am tired, by the honesty of one small thing nobody will check, by whether I keep pace with someone slower instead of leaving them behind. I am not walking in order to belong to the light; I belong to it already, and the walking is simply what that looks like in shoes. And I am not walking alone. Someone has kept step with me every mile so far, at my pace, never impatient, never far ahead. Let me go the whole day on foot, and let the light show in the going.
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