Mass readings for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Laetare):
2 Chronicles 36.14-17a, 19-23 Psalm 137.1-6 Ephesians 2.4-10 John 3.14-21
At the Christmas Eve service, we read a famous passage from Isaiah: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of darkness—on them light has shone.” (Isaiah 9.2).
Today, in our gospel, we hear from our Lord that, indeed, this light has come into the world, but “people loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light…”
I’m sure we all recognize the truth of that. There are those who are obstinate in their rejection of the light, the light of truth, of divine love. Of course, that rejection is not couched in bloody-minded commitment to evil – while popular entertainment might give us the villains of James Bond, the evil mastermind hatching his plots while stroking a white cat in his lap – the reality is that no one thinks of themselves this way even as we might regard them as such. Think of Vladimir Putin. His self-understanding, I imagine, is that of a Russian patriot; and whatever corruption he indulges in for his personal benefit he sees as justified in light of the great service he renders to his people. And we shouldn’t be naïve about how many of our western political leadership regard their own corruption as petty in light of all the good they think they do for us.
So, Jesus isn’t speaking about the tiny minority of self-aware psychopaths. Rather, he, as with Isaiah, is concerned with the general state of humanity, and that among us there are those who are well aware that we are in the dark, while there are as many who are unaware, that mole-like they labor in a dark world to which they’ve become accustomed.
I often speak in terms of the contest between God and Satan, virtue and sin, sanctity and degeneracy as at heart being the clash of truth and love with power. And power darkens the vision of all those who pursue it, hold it jealously and make it their priority to retain it. Living in truth, with a devotion to service to others brings light and joy into our lives – power brings gloom and fear, even paranoia – all things that those who pursue power claim will be eliminated once they possess power and use it for our good.
The leadership of our society, our communities and our families, ideally lives the ethos of truth and love; but we can find ourselves making concession to power as a force in our lives – the Christian is to use it sparingly, as in times of war when those forces wholly devoted to the idea of power come marching against us. As our elites, those who run our institutions, staff the senior levels of bureaucracy, manage the major corporations and lead the political parties grow away from our Christian heritage, the gospel values I speak of are increasingly paid lip service as the gaining, exercising, and retaining of power becomes all.
The Roman Imperial reality into which Jesus was born, was a system of oppression that put up a façade of beneficence. The great monuments of that time, the remnants and fragments which now are the stuff of tourist itineraries, were built to express, and impress upon the population, the power of Rome, but also to justify it by presenting the empire as ultimately a project of philanthropy. This was the story of Rome, or rather, the accepted narrative that celebrated Rome, written in the stone of temples, altars, triumphal arches and other monuments found in every city of the empire. One exceptional example of these is on display in Vienna: The Parthian Altar that once graced the city of Ephesus.
This was an enormous monument to a military victory over the rival Parthian Empire. Aside from depicting in marble carvings the war, there are representations of what we might call “the family of nations” that made up the Roman empire: each province given figurative representation and shown as part of a community under the protection of the gods, and more importantly, being led into a bright future by the genius of the emperors (in this case, the Antonine Emperors of the second century who brought the Empire to its peak).
And I can imagine that had I been in Ephesus in the year 180 A.D., looking around at the magnificence of the city, I’d see that monument and, however begrudgingly as a Christian, I would likely believe that God had smiled on the pagan Romans. Now, I’d have to forget the mixed bag of emperors who’d come before, the successors of Augustus – his degenerate stepson Tiberius, the mad Caligula and the demented egoist Nero. And in the years following my visit, as the eccentric young emperor Commodus took the reins of power, and the chaos of mismanagement, corruption, rampant inflation, and disastrous wars both civil and foreign returned with a vengeance, I’d have to admit that really my judgement was wrong; that I had allowed myself to be taken in by that beautiful but false vision of the empire. The brutal reality of it would soon be made apparent to me, because the following 200 years would see the empire decline, and the renewal of horrifically violent persecution of Christians who were the scapegoats for all the ills of the empire.
Now we modern people aren’t spoken to by the powers that be in the language of monumental architecture so much. That is still in the mix, but now we’re more oriented toward audio and visual media– the story of our civilization is very much a narrative that weaves its way through entertainment, news, commercial advertising, government information campaigns, the speeches of our leaders and the commentary of political pundits. And for all the apparent criticism and raucous debate, the story is still one of progress toward a bright future of harmony, peace, and prosperity under the guidance of our elites.
I would find it hard to believe than anyone thinks of themselves as being in the dark – it’s a devastating thing to come to that realization, usually through an unpleasant or tragic occurrence. To have those people and institutions that we’ve relied upon prove false to us can leave us fearful – and perversely anxious to acquire a little power for ourselves, for protection, to fend off the coercion of illegitimate authority, keep at bay the bullies.
As with the ancient Romans, and their subject peoples, we’re coming to see that the story we’re told doesn’t match the reality we live. The security that the Roman Empire was to provide in exchange for everyone’s obedience, proved to be faulty and uncertain. It’s not that people wanted the barbarians to come in, but the empire faltered as confidence was lost in it, and the ancient world disappeared in consequence, and then society was rescued by the Church, albeit, a society in ruins needing to be rebuilt.
As someone who studies media, I am amused to hear the complaint from our political and cultural leaders that the major media corporations are less and less able to mold opinion and shape consensus through their managing of the information we as a society have.
When I was studying at university back in the late 80s, one of the classic critiques of modern media was published. It’s title, Manufacturing Consent, expresses its central idea: that within democratic societies, the consent of the governed is necessary for the legitimacy of the system, but this consent is engineered by the manipulation of information. Now the coauthors, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that this doesn’t happen through conspiracy, but rather as the result of market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship – what was then called “political correctness” and now “wokeness”. Of course, today, we know from U.S. congressional testimony concerning social media, there is coercion; and in Canada there is an appetite on both sides of parliament for censorship legislation, ostensibly to protect the vulnerable, but with far-ranging and arbitrary power over online communication that can be easily abused. Should these come into law, there will be a chilling effect on free speech.
This is all to say that as things come uncomfortably to light because institutions are increasingly feckless, and their ability to control information is faltering, we as Christians have to be careful of the consequences. There will be a tremendous effort to reassert control over information, because information is power. And as this fails, the necessity for scapegoats could appear – and they will always be those most politically vulnerable, those who can be blamed absent any evidence, but with powerful and continuous messaging that all the mess and turmoil is down to them. And that won’t be those we see today who break the law with impunity, spew messages of hate, indeed of genocide, without any effective censure or penalty. The Church then is a favored target.
We learn from our first reading that Jerusalem fell due to lack of faith, its corruption, its unwillingness to face the truth of what it had become and so, repent and turn back to God. The king and the people preferred the story they told themselves over the harsh yet enlightening words of prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Today, we have the privilege of taking up that prophetic role, and of calling people to come to the light, telling them not be afraid of what they might see then in either themselves or the world, but rather be assured that in the light of Christ they will not perish, but have eternal life.
Jesus commissioned us to be builders of a new city, at heart a spiritual one into which all are welcome to come and live in the light.
Amen.