Shayne Looper: Lighter or darker: You are the switch
Poets and novelists have always made symbolic use of light and darkness, with light representing good and darkness representing evil. It could be argued that Shakespeare reverses this in "Romeo and Juliet," but clearly the Bard relied on those traditional associations to achieve the effect he desired.
Light and dark symbolism is much older than Shakespeare. Homer used it more than two millennia earlier, and he was predated by religious texts like the Vedas and parts of the Old Testament. In the New Testament Gospel of John, the Evangelist makes use of light and darkness in his first sentences and is still doing so in his last chapters.
In the Bible, light evokes joy, truth, productivity, and God himself. Darkness images falsehood, confusion, evil, and judgment. Jesus’s followers once resided in “the dominion of darkness,” but have been rescued and brought into the kingdom of God’s son, the kingdom of light. Jesus refers to his followers as “the people of light.”
Jesus uses the image of light to suggest clarity and safety. The person who walks by day does not stumble, but the person who walks by night “stumbles for he has no light.” It is in the light that good work can be done, but “Night is coming, when no one can work.” In the Psalms, light enables people to follow the path laid out for them.
With light comes clarity, guidance, and safety, but frequently in scripture the light does not come all at once. When Jesus holds out the hope that his hearers might become sons of light, some sort of process seems to be in mind. Likewise, the Proverb compares “The path of the righteous” to “the first gleam of dawn,” which shines “ever brighter till the full light of day.”
In these images, the light increases; it grows brighter. This seems to suggest that the benefits of light, like clarity, guidance, and safety, might also grow. This fits well with the oddly phrased Psalm 97:11, in which the writer appears to mix his metaphors. He writes, “Light is sown for the righteous.” It grows like a seed.
The curious image here is of a farmer sowing light as if it were seed. Like the first gleam of dawn, the seed is barely noticeable, yet it portends big changes. It will, as Jesus says in a different context, produce “a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” Then it will be like “the full light of day.”
The idea here is that light and the things associated with it, including clarity, productivity, and joy, come gradually but grow steadily. This certainly seems to fit with what Jesus taught about knowing truth, which is elsewhere described as a “fruit of the light.” He promised that anyone who chooses to do the will of God will come to know whether or not his teaching is true. Knowledge grows as people do what they already know to be right.
But what if they don’t act on what they already know to be right? Will the light fade? Jesus seemed to think so. The classic Amplified Version paraphrases him this way: “For to him who has [spiritual knowledge] will more be given; and from him who does not have [spiritual knowledge], even what he thinks and guesses and supposes that he has will be taken away.”
Just as dawn’s rays “shine ever brighter till the full light of day,” the murkiness of dusk grows steadily darker until the way “is like deep darkness” and those who walk in it “do not know what makes them stumble.” Could this explain why people who are lost in hatred, bigotry, and greed are incapable of seeing what is making their lives so miserable?
In Psalm 105, a psalm that celebrates God’s love and help for his people, the psalmist recalls how God punished Egypt by sending darkness on the land. He considered this punishment apropos, for the Egyptians had rebelled against God’s words, which was tantamount to choosing darkness. The darkness around them was a picture of the darkness in them.
Both light and darkness grow, and people are the switch that determines what will happen.
— Find this and other articles by Shayne Looper at shaynelooper.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Shayne Looper: Lighter or darker: You are the switch
