28.11 | Unmixed
1 John 1:1-2:17
‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
1 John 1:5-7
Year 9 chemistry didn't teach me a lot. But, for some reason, I’ve always remembered the difference between a compound and a mixture.
A compound is when two (or more) elements are chemically bonded together, in such a way that they make a new substance. Maybe the most famous takes two parts of hydrogen, and one part of oxygen. When chemically bonded these two gases form a new substance: water.
A mixture, on the other hand, combines different elements (or compounds), and yet doesn’t actually bond them together. They might be all muddled up and mixed in, but they’re still essentially different things. You can mix salt into water, and get salty water, and yet, the salt and the water are still two different things. A cup of tea was my favourite example. Water, tea, milk, mixed together, and yet remaining different parts.
Today we’re starting the letters of John. Scholars divide on whether this is the John of the Gospel accounts, or a different John—sometimes known as ‘John the Elder’. Whichever is true, there is a deep overlap of the themes of John’s Gospel—light and truth and love and eternity and abiding—and he was clearly an eyewitness of the risen Jesus.1 He writes with a an emotive awareness of the darkness, pain, fears and hatreds of the world, and yet with a crystalline clarity of the realities of Jesus’ light. Time spent with John is an invitation to see the world with a stark and fundamental difference between those things that are heavenly, alive, light, and love, and those things that are broken, dead, darkness and hate.
And, as John invites us to see more clearly, he would have us delve into our very souls, inviting such a separation right there within.
It is the difference between light and darkness. Light is clarity, it is sight, it is knowledge, it is truth. Light is what enables us to perceive the true nature of all things, and to navigate our way with clarity and security. When we stand in and see in and walk in the light, we put away confusion and distraction and uncertainty, for in the light our path is clear. We know our values. We know our path. We know our selves. We know our destination.
It is the difference between sin and wholeness. It enables honest recognition of our places of brokenness, mistakes, and pain, bringing these to the Father for His dismissal of what is wounded and warped, and His healing2 into the very wholeness of Jesus.
It is the difference between hatred and love. It is the teasing out in our own motives and souls of the places where we act from fear and comparison and the desire to retaliate and criticise and break down, and the basic realities of love. For love eternally wills the wellbeing of another, looks to build another, looks to serve another. Love is the healing agent of all relationships, and the freest and fullest a heart can be. Love has cast aside our anxious clutching at significance for self, in the beautiful freedom of desiring the life of another.
John wants us to know that our lives may be a mixture of darkness and light, sin and wholeness, hatred and love, and yet that these things in us are a mixture, and not a compound, for they can indeed be separated.
Look closer, my friends. The life of the heavens has been opened, and the realities of the age to come are breaking in. The true light is already shining. And our every day is an invitation into this kind of separation of soul, leaving behind all things of darkness, and stepping with ever greater clarity and radiance into the heavenly light.
Reflect:
Darkness and light. Sin and wholeness. Hatred and love.
Which is the Spirit highlighting to me, to bring me further into the ways of the Kingdom today?
Do as John says. Confess it (name the truth of it). Ask Him to dismiss it. And invite His healing.
Pray:
Father in heaven,
You have opened the ways before me
Of eternity:
Eternal light;
Eternal wholeness;
Eternal love.
Where my vision is clouded,
And my life becomes a mixture,
Would you come and separate within me
The light from the dark
The whole from the sinful,
And the loving from the hating,
That I may walk further this day
Into the clarity of the eternal ways,
In the beauty of the light that already shines.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Daniel 5-6 | Psalm 136:17-26
See 1 John 1:1
The word ‘cleanse’ in 1:9 is the Greek word katharizō, which is often used in the New Testament for the healing of lepers. It is where we get our word ‘cathartic.’