![]() We experience it with the rising of the sun or with the flick of a switch. Without it, we know nothing but confused stumbling. This LIFE was LIGHT, something that illuminates, makes visible and comprehensible the true world around us. ![]() Not the radiant photons emitted by the chemical action of combusting lamp oil, not the visible spectra raining down upon the earth from the sun’s sustained nuclear processes, not the processing power of human rods and cones into a 3D image of our surroundings. He says that the LIFE that was in Jesus was the LIGHT of men. Then John takes another simple word and extends his metaphor. But for those who saw this life (and for us), it is shockingly, turbulently, delightfully new. John says in the lines before these that this life has been around a long, long time. I say “again” because it really isn’t new. This word John uses, “life”, is a simple word with which we are familiar, but John elevates it, making it new and strange and a little bit shocking again. Whatever was in Jesus, those who saw it recognized it as something wonderful and they dropped everything they were doing to see what it was. This is life beyond the set of chemical processes currently held by the scientific consensus as constituting life, more than the few struggling years we string together between birth and grave, more than the moments of duty and plodding we experience punctuated by a few joys and horrors along the way. ![]() This is not just “life” as we normally think of it (“well, I guess that’s just life” or “eww, is it still alive?”) but LIFE, something vibrant and energetic, something strange, shocking, and real that hadn’t been seen before in the world. John is giving us a whole world in these two sentences if we attend closely. John is fond of poetic metaphors and his gospel teems with them. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” “ In him was life, and the life was the light of men. In the opening lines of the gospel of John, we read these lines:
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