Let Your Light Shine
Day 266 – 23 September
Washed While You Walk
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7, KJV)
Water Left in the Sun
In 1984 a professor at the American University of Beirut, Aftim Acra, published a short booklet through UNICEF describing something that sounded almost too simple to be true: that ordinary sunlight could make contaminated drinking water safe. Through the 1990s researchers at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, tested the idea in laboratories and villages and shaped it into a standard method they called SODIS, solar water disinfection. The recipe fits on a postcard. A clear plastic bottle of a litre or two is filled with water that has first been left to settle clear, and laid in full sun on a roof or a sheet of corrugated iron. Six hours under a bright or half-clouded sky, or two whole days if the sky is fully overcast, and the ultraviolet part of the light, helped by the warmth, damages the bacteria and viruses in the water until they can no longer multiply. The World Health Organization lists it among its recommended ways of treating water at home, and Eawag’s own monitoring counts at least five million people who have taken it up. Two small conditions decide whether it works. The bottle must be clear, since coloured plastic blocks the rays, and the water must be clear too, because cloudiness gives the germs somewhere to shelter from the light. Given those, the cleansing simply carries on, hour after hour, for as long as the bottle stays where the sun can reach it. Nineteen centuries earlier, the apostle John described a cleansing that keeps the very same timetable.
The Claim John Tests
John opened his first letter with a message he said he had heard from Jesus Himself: God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). That is the language of holiness and truth, a way of saying that everything in God is open, pure, and without shadow, and it gave John a test he could apply to anyone claiming to know Him. He seems to have had in view people who claimed fellowship with God while living in ways they kept hidden, and his answer was blunt: to walk in darkness while making that claim is to lie (1:6). Then he set out the true alternative, which is our verse. “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” The walking verb is the one we met on Monday, here in the form περιπατῶμεν (peripatōmen, we walk, we keep on walking), a present tense describing the settled direction of a life. And the standard it sets is breathtaking in its reach: as He is in the light. The believer’s life is meant to be lived in the same element as God’s own, out in the open, where everything can be seen.
Living in the Open
Walking in the light, then, turns out to be something more ordinary and more demanding than feeling spiritual. It means living honestly before God, with nothing kept in a back room, and it quickly means living honestly before one another as well, because the first result John names is fellowship, κοινωνία (koinōnia, fellowship, a life held in common), one with another. Readers have long debated whether that phrase means believers with each other or believers with God, and the letter’s own opening holds the two together, since John wrote so that his readers might share fellowship with the apostles, whose fellowship was with the Father and the Son (1:3). People who stop hiding from God tend to stop hiding from each other, and a church made of such people becomes a place where it is safe to be known. The part that surprises many readers comes next. Walking in the light is emphatically a walk with dust on it. John says so in the very next verse: if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves (1:8). The people in the light are people who still sin. What marks them out is where they walk with it: in the open, where it shows, and where something can be done about it.
The Cleansing That Keeps Going
What is done about it is the heart of the verse. “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” The verb is καθαρίζει (katharizei, cleanses), from καθαρίζω (katharizō, to make clean, to purify), the word the Gospels use of lepers made clean and of cups washed out, and the family from which English eventually borrowed catharsis. Its tense is the treasure. John wrote it in the present, the tense of continuing action, so that its force is less “cleansed once” and more “goes on cleansing”, keeps on cleansing, is cleansing us now; the King James “cleanseth” catches that running sense well. The verse therefore pairs two present tenses, and they move together. While we keep on walking in the light, the blood keeps on cleansing. And the reach is total, ἀπὸ πάσης ἁμαρτίας (apo pasēs hamartias, from all sin), with no kind of failure left outside it. The bottle on the roof helps here, provided we hold the picture carefully. In the village the sunlight itself does the disinfecting. In John’s verse the light is the place and the blood is the power: the cleansing flows from Christ’s self-giving on the cross, and the light is simply where the cleansed are walking. What the two share is the timetable. The water on the roof is being made clean all the while it lies in the sun, and the believer walking in the open is being made clean all the while they walk. Anyone who has set out on this road will still gather dust on it today, and will also be washed, continually, along the way. That is why the light holds no terror for them. Out in the open, where the sin shows, is exactly where the cleansing is happening.
Clear Bottles and Settled Water
The village method’s two conditions have their counterparts as well. A coloured bottle keeps the rays out, and cloudy water gives the germs a hiding place, and John names the human equivalent two verses on: if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1:9). Confession is the soul becoming clear glass, letting the light see what is really there, agreeing with God about it without disguise. Its opposite is the tinted bottle and the murky water: the excuse, the carefully managed story, the sin renamed as something smaller, every device for keeping the light from reaching what needs it. None of this means clarity earns the cleansing. Clear glass contributes nothing to the sun; it simply stops standing in the way. In the same manner, a believer’s honesty purchases nothing, since the cleansing was paid for in full by Another; honesty only keeps a life where the washing goes on. The one thing that keeps a walker dirty is the decision to hide.
A Midweek Walk in the Open
Wednesday makes a good day to take stock of where you are walking. Something from the first half of this week may well be sitting in a back room: a sharp word you have justified, a small dishonesty you have tidied away, a resentment you have left unnamed. Bring it out into the open. That can be as brief as a sentence of plain confession in the car or at the kitchen sink, with no excuses attached. It might also mean an honest word with a friend, or an apology to the person on the receiving end, the fellowship half of the verse doing its work among you. Then walk on, lighter, leaving the thing behind, because the cleansing you need has already been going on and will go on all day. The walkers in the light are the ones who are washed as they go. Between now and tonight you will gather some dust, as every walker does. Keep to the open road, and let it be washed away in the sunshine.
Declaration
I will pick up dust today, and I have given up pretending otherwise. I tried the other way for a long time, keeping the dirt in a back room and smiling in the hallway, and it left me tired and lonely. So I am walking in the open now. Whatever I get wrong, I will bring out where it can be seen, name it plainly, and let it be dealt with, without excuses and without delay. I will let the people near me know me as I am, and I will make it safe for them to be known in return. None of this earns my cleansing; that was paid for long ago by a love that gave itself completely, and it goes on working for as long as I keep to the light. So I will neither hide nor despair. Let me keep to the open road all day, and let the washing go on as I walk.
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