Let Your Light Shine
Day 255 – 12 September
A Light Seen for Miles
You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. (Matthew 5:14, NKJV)
The View From Thirty-Five Thousand Feet
Anyone who has flown at night knows the moment. The cabin lights are dimmed, the land below is a featureless black, and then, off to one side, a soft golden smear appears on the dark, a whole town glowing at once, sixty or seventy miles away. On a flight over New Mexico one passenger checked afterwards and found that the city he had watched slide past his window lay sixty-seven miles from the aircraft’s path; it had been unmissable. Go higher and the effect only grows. Astronauts on the International Space Station, two hundred and fifty miles up, say that by day a great city like Chicago blends almost invisibly into the grey-green land around it, but that by night its ten million people cannot be missed; the whole metropolis burns like a lamp on the black earth. Sally Ride said that on moonless nights she found it hard to tell the earth from the sky, because the twinkling lights below might have been stars. No one on that station, though, could pick out a single lit window. One house, one lamp, is lost from the air. But a city of lamps, gathered together, is one of the most visible things on the planet. Jesus knew this long before anyone flew.
A City, Not a Candle
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives His disciples two pictures of the light they are, and we have spent the week on the second, the lamp. The first comes earlier in the same verse, and it is different in one crucial way. “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). A lamp is a single thing; a city, πόλις (polis, city), is a multitude. And the Greek puts the impossibility first for emphasis: οὐ δύναται (ou dynatai, is unable), a city cannot be hidden. The word for its position, κειμένη (keimenē, set, situated), pictures a town deliberately placed on high ground, which is where towns of that age were built, for safety; and from where Jesus sat, teaching on the Galilean hillside, He may well have been able to point to one, a huddle of pale walls on a ridge across the valley, catching the light. Commentators have suggested Nazareth on its escarpment, or Jerusalem on its heights. Whichever He meant, the logic is plain. You can cover a lamp with a bowl; you cannot cover a town with anything. Its walls stand against the sky by day and its lamps gather into one glow by night, and everyone for miles knows exactly where it is. The lamp, as we have seen all week, can be hidden. The city, by its very nature, cannot.
You Are Part of the Skyline
This is the piece the arc has been waiting for, and it changes the feel of everything before it. All week the question has been what you do with your one lamp, and that question stands. But the first picture Jesus gave was never of a lamp at all. It was of a city. You, plural, the whole company of those who follow Him, are a πόλις (polis, city) set on a hill, and a city is a corporate thing, a gathered light made of thousands of small ones. Your single lamp, fairly assessed, is small; from any distance it would be lost. But it was never meant to shine alone. Set among the others, the believer in the next street, the church across town, the millions across the world, it becomes part of a glow that can be seen from very far off, the way one window joins ten million others to make Chicago unmissable from orbit. Two things follow, and both are gifts. The first is comfort: you were never asked to be a lighthouse. Your part is one window in a city that God has set on a hill, and the visibility is the city’s, given by its position, guaranteed by its Builder. The second is a sobering honour: the city is watched. Because the church together cannot be hidden, the world is always looking at it, and what it sees when it looks is the sum of a great many small lamps. Isaiah saw the mountain of the Lord’s house lifted above the hills and the nations streaming towards it, drawn by its light. That is the calling of the city on the hill, and every believer is a lit window in it. The God who set the city there did so on purpose. He never intended a hidden church, a church tucked below the skyline, because a hidden city is a contradiction in terms. He built His people to be a landmark.
Saturday, Before the City Gathers
Tomorrow the city gathers on its hill. All over the world, in the morning, the scattered lamps of the week will come together into one room after another, and for an hour or two the church will be what it always is but can rarely see: a single gathered light, plainly visible. Saturday is the day to decide to be in it. It is easy, after a long week, to treat the gathering as optional, a lamp’s private choice; but a city is only a city because its houses stand together, and a window that stays dark leaves a gap in the skyline that others notice. So make your plans to be there, and go as a lit window, one of the lights that make the city a city. Bring your one small lamp and set it among the others, glad to be part of a glow far larger than anything you could make on your own. And carry the comfort of this verse through the rest of today: your light was never asked to carry the whole hill by itself. It is one window in a city God has set where it cannot be hidden, and the shining of the whole, seen for miles, is His doing before it is ever yours. Be a bright window. And leave the visibility of the whole to the One who built it on the hill.
Declaration
My light was never meant to stand alone on a hill; it is one window in a city. On my own I am small, a single lamp that any distance would swallow, and I have sometimes felt the weight of being the only light in a dark place. But that burden was never laid on me. I belong to a gathered light, thousands upon thousands of windows set together on high ground, and the glow of the whole is seen for miles by the very nature of where it was placed. So I will stop measuring my shine as if it had to light the world by itself. Tomorrow I will take my place among the others, one lit window in the skyline, glad that the city is plainly seen even when no single lamp is noticed. And through today I will remember what a city is: houses standing together, each one lit, and none of them hidden, because the One who set it on the hill meant it to be a landmark. I am one window. The city belongs to the One who built it. Let it be seen for miles.
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