Let Your Light Shine
Day 268 – 25 September
Beside the Unconquered Light
The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. (John 12:35, ESV)
When the Sun Shines, Make Hay
In 1546 the Tudor writer John Heywood published a collection of English proverbs, and among them, written down for the first time, was a piece of farmyard wisdom that was already old in his day: when the sun shines, make hay. Heywood even added a gloss for anyone slow to take the point, which ran, in his spelling, take time when time cometh, lest time steal away. Every farmer in the land knew why. Hay needs several dry days in a row to be cut, turned, dried, and carried, and hay that goes into the stack damp will mould and heat, spoiling the winter feed of the animals that depend on it. A Tudor farmer had no forecast beyond the evening sky and the old rhymes about it, so a fair spell usually sent the whole household into the field to work until the light failed. What the proverb captured was a simple posture towards a gift. The farmer made none of the sunshine and commanded none of it; his whole part was to answer it while it was there.
The Light Among You
While it was there is very nearly the phrase Jesus used about Himself, in some of the last public words John records. It was Passover week in Jerusalem, days before the cross, and He had just told the crowd that when He was lifted up from the earth He would draw all people to Himself (John 12:32). They were puzzled, and asked who this Son of Man could be, and His answer took them back to the image He had used of Himself all through John’s Gospel. “The light is among you for a little while longer,” He said. “Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going” (John 12:35). The light among them was Jesus Himself, walking their streets in person, and the little while was the handful of days left before He went to the cross. Those days were few, and yet the light was about to reach further, since the cross was the very lifting up by which He would draw all people to Himself. What was brief was the season in which that particular crowd could walk beside Him in Jerusalem, and so He told them what to do with it.
Walk, and Believe
What to do with it came in two verbs. The first is the walking verb we have followed all week, περιπατεῖτε (peripateite, walk), a command to keep going in the light that was shining on their road. The second came in the next breath: “While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons of light” (John 12:36). To believe, πιστεύετε (pisteuete, believe, trust), is to lean the whole weight of a life on the One who is light, and the result is a change of family, because those who trust Him become υἱοὶ φωτός (huioi phōtos, sons of light), people who belong to the light as children belong to a home. The verb there, γένησθε (genēsthe, you may become), describes a becoming that is received, the way a child is born into a household. Between those two commands Jesus sketched the other road in one plain line, a person walking in the dark who has no idea where they are heading, which is the traveller of Tuesday’s psalm without a lamp, feeling for the path with every step. The word Jesus chose for what the dark does to such a traveller is where this verse opens up.
The Verb That Opened the Gospel
That word is καταλάβῃ (katalabē, may overtake), from καταλαμβάνω (katalambanō, to seize, to overtake, to lay hold of), and any reader who has followed John from the beginning has met it before. In the fifth verse of the Gospel, John wrote that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness οὐ κατέλαβεν (ou katelaben, never overcame, never mastered) it. The same verb stands at both ends of the story. At the start, John tells us that darkness reached for the light and failed, a failure so many-sided that the old translations said the darkness comprehended it not, the modern ones say it has not overcome it, one version says it has never mastered it, and another that it has never put it out, and the Greek word carries every one of those senses. Near the close of Jesus’s public teaching the same verb returns, and now it describes what darkness does to a traveller who has stepped away from the light. Darkness can overtake a traveller; it has never overtaken the Light. On John’s telling, then, the safest place in the world is close beside the One whom darkness has never once managed to catch. The tense of that opening verse adds a further comfort, since the light φαίνει (phainei, shines) in the present, continuously, which means the offer never flickers. Jesus spoke of darkness the way any traveller would, as the plain behaviour of night on an unlit road, closing in on whoever has left the lamp behind, and He urged His hearers towards the one place it had never reached. What runs short is only ever our own today, which is why today is the day to answer.
Hay Weather on a Friday
Today is the day to answer, and the farmer shows how. When the fair spell came he went out at once, whatever else was on the list, because the weather was the gift and his response was the only thing in his hands. Somewhere in your Friday there is a fair spell of your own: a nudge towards the conversation you have been postponing, the prayer you have meant to pray for a month, the forgiveness you have rehearsed and kept to yourself, the step of trust that has been waiting for you to feel ready. Go out into the field today, because readiness usually arrives after the first swing of the scythe and seldom before it. And go without panic, because the Light you are answering is neither fickle weather nor a rationed gift; it has shone on your road since the day you set out, and it shines there still. The urgency sits entirely on our side of the gate. Walk while you have the light, which is always now, and walk close beside the One whom darkness has never managed to catch.
Declaration
There is sunshine on my road this morning, and I mean to answer it today. I have a habit of leaving things for a better week: the conversation I keep postponing, the forgiveness I keep rehearsing, the step of trust I intend to take once I feel readier. A farmer who waited for readiness in fair weather would lose the harvest, and I will stop farming that way. The light I walk by has never been rationed and has never gone out; what runs short is only my own today, which is why today is the day to answer it. I will walk while it shines on me, and I will trust my whole weight to it, since the one thing darkness has never managed is to master that light. Whatever gathers at the edges of this day, I will keep close to it. Let me walk near today, beside a light that darkness has never once caught.
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