Matthew 4.12–17
A Christmas sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 19th December 2021
Christmas is a time we think a lot about family. Those of us who are getting on also think about long-gone parents—those who gave us our first Christmases. I have been thinking a lot about my mother. She gave me a lot of love and some wonderful Christmas memories. Her first child died very young; I think I got a double-issue: his love as well as my own. But losing that child cast a heavy shadow over her life. When I was young she described herself as agnostic; though I wonder. We didn’t go to church, but she had a friendwho worked with Bush Church Aid Society, and at one point joined me up to do Mail Bag Sunday School. I don’t remember what I learned. But whatever glimmer of belief my mother may have had expressed itself then as anger towards God.
Until she went to stay with her sister in Brisbane. Billy Graham had not long come and gone, and my aunt and uncle had begun to believe in Jesus. They tried to talk to my mother, but she wished they would leave her alone. One night everyone had gone to bed except my mother. She read a book they had given her called A Reporter Finds God; she was unhappy and angry. She told me she threw the Bible open and said, “All right God, what do you want to say to me?” The book fell open about the middle—to Isaiah 60:
Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
The passage features one of the songs from Handel’s Messiah. She broke, surrendered herself to God, and a new life began. As a fourteen-year old I had no understanding of what had happened, but I experienced the difference. It was like she had emerged from a long time in the darkness into the light of a new day. The rest of her life was marked by joy.
For this Christmas sermon I have chosen a reading from Matthew 4 where Matthew describes the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry also as the dawning of light.
Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: “The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.” From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Part of this also features in Messiah, along with some other passages that speak of Israel’s salvation as the coming of light. These passages, no doubt because they meant so much to the New Testament writers, grabbed the attention of Charles Jennens, the man who put together the libretto of Messiah.
There is an old Jewish sermon called “The Light of Messiah.” Some parts I would judge are older than Jesus. According to this sermon when the promised king arrives, he will come to the temple and stand on its topmost pinnacle and announce himself. Then he will add, “And if you do not believe it, then behold my light!” “As it is written,” the sermon, explains, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.” This is the same text from Isaiah that God used to speak his word of salvation to my mother. It is also one of the scriptures that lies behind our reading in Matthew.
But how are we to understand this light that will accompany Messiah’s coming. Whoever wrote the Jewish sermon imagined a visible radiance would stream forth from him—like the light that comes from the fingertip of the Columbia lady at the movies. But Jesus’ appearance was not unusual—although on one occasion he took three of his followers to the top of a mountain and they saw him transfigured and shining. Moses and Elijah spoke with him and they heard the voice of God. But this was temporary—just a glimpse of something heavenly and future, to assure them he was really who he said he was; things soon returned to normal. What is this light, then, that Matthew speaks of?
Light is weird. Stand side on to a laser beam and you will not see it. That is because light is invisible unless you stand in the way of it. Only when it bounces off things it and reaches your eyes do they—the things— become visible. I use a mouth guard to stop me snoring at night, but I am forever forgetting to put it in. “Got your mouth guard?” says Lorraine after we have turned out the light. “Darn it, I forgot,” and I will start feeling around for it on the bedside table. Do you think I can find it? I’m certain my hand has felt all over the table; I know it’s there, but no way can I find it. So, there’s nothing for it but to turn on the light, and there it is. Things are so difficult without light; close your eyes for a moment and imagine that is your life; admire the person who is blind, but who nevertheless learns to cope.
According to the Bible, light was the first thing God made. I wonder if it was this that made Einstein suspect there might be something special about light. Energy is proportional to mass by a factor of the square of the speed of light in a vacuum: E=mc2. Why? How? It was a wonder to Einstein. It could only be by design. My atheist friends tried to convince me the universe could have started as a simple quantum accident and evolved from a simple beginning. But what is simple about light? We don’t even know what it is fully. How can a quantum of light travel 160 million kilometers from the sun without any of it leaking away into the darkness? Genesis says God separated the light from the darkness; he certainly did it well.
Israel had a thing with light. When God acted to rescue them from slavery, a darkness came over the whole of Egypt—but there was light in Goshen where Israel lived. From then on light was always associated with the presence of God, and darkness with his absence. A thousand years later when they were carted off from their land it was like leaving the light and going into darkness.
But light also means knowledge; ignorance is darkness. When you learn something new, that before you just could not understand, it’s like coming into the light, partly because many other things now make sense.
Light is also goodness and evil is darkness. Most cultures sense this. But read the Psalms and you will see that in the Bible misery is also darkness. When you are depressed it’s like being in the shadows; you can’t think straight until the depression lifts and light returns. And finally, death is darkness, just as life is light. So much richness of imagery came out of Israel’s experience of light. And I wonder can we not put all these things together: the presence of God means understanding and goodness, happiness, and life; move away from God and you’re moving away from all these things.
So, the prophets foretold a time when God would return to his people: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you …”
This is a promise to Israel, of course. People who read the Bible tend to identify with whom they think are the heroes and appropriate the promise to themselves. I used to think my mother’s hearing the promise as meant for her, an individual and a Gentile, was a bit dodgy. But not really. The old man Simeon in the temple took the infant Jesus in his arms and said:
Now Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace … for my eyes have seen your salvation … a light of revelation for the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel. (Luke 2)
This is the only mention of Gentiles in Luke 1–2, but clearly they are to share in the light of Messiah’s coming. God’s plan is to bring the light of eternal life to all the nations of the world.
But let’s think for a moment of how this happens for an individual—how it can happen for you and me. It begins, as we saw with creation. God made it all as a formless swirling mass. He then begins to form something beautiful, and his first step is to create light and separate it off from the darkness. We become aware of the world before we are even self-aware. We emerge from the darkness of the womb into the light. That is where we all begin. We are nothing until there is a world and God gives us a share in it.
But the world soon fell into darkness. Evil came and our first parents embraced it—or rather it deceived and enveloped them, just as it does us. We live in a world of evil and suffering, a world where people claw after the light of happiness and it often eludes them. We know times of happiness; we have a feel for what it means to walk in the light, but we also experience the darkness. People avoid God, seeing him as a threat to their happiness, but the further we go the more confusing life becomes—and it becomes darker and darker.
One of my students came to Cape Town from Australia. He shared his story: a life of total self-centredness which left him isolated and alone—in his bedroom—curled up like a ball —a foetus—crying out to God to save him. I heard a Zimbabwean man tell his story. He was a terrorist at the time of the bush war. He came to a Christian tent meeting with the intention of shooting it up. As he sat there waiting for his moment, what the preacher was saying broke into his consciousness. He went home and surrendered his life to Jesus. Stephen Lungu has written his story: Out of the Black Shadows. You may have your own darkness-to-light story.
And then there is death, which casts a shadow over us all, and threatens to return us to the darkness from which we came. But Jesus’ resurrection and the promises of the gospel tell us there is light even at the end of that tunnel.
The Jews had a festival of light—part of the Feast of Tabernacles. They say that the light from the temple illuminated the whole of Jerusalem. Probably it was during that celebration that Jesus came to the temple and said,
I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.
I pray that this Christmas will be more for us than coloured lights—that if you have not known it before, you will cry out to God from whatever may be the darkness that spoils your life, and begin to know the God-man, of whom John said, “In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1)