Jay: Talking about darkness and light, as we did last week, leads us to consider what we can see and what we can’t see. It leads us to think about discernment, visual and intellectual. Darkness and our inability to discern things in it leaves us feeling vulnerable; light gives us confidence by giving us the ability to discern and deal with the things around us.
Darkness and light may be said to represent two different states of existence, but they are not strictly binary—they constitute a continuum—except at the very ends of the scale. At one end is the deepest darkness, utter darkness. Jesus made several references to it:
But the centurion said, “Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.” Now when Jesus heard this, He marveled and said to those who were following, “Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:8-12)
“Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered together all they found, both evil and good; and the wedding hall was filled with dinner guests.
“But when the king came in to look over the dinner guests, he saw a man there who was not dressed in wedding clothes, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you come in here without wedding clothes?’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the servants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:10-14)
“And the one also who had received the one talent came up and said, ‘Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. And I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in the ground. See, you have what is yours.’
“But his master answered and said to him, ‘You wicked, lazy slave, you knew that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I scattered no seed. Then you ought to have put my money in the bank, and on my arrival I would have received my money back with interest. Therefore take away the talent from him, and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’
“For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. Throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 25:24-30)
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the light of Creation:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:1-5)
We tend to think of the origin of light as the Sun, which was not created until the fourth day of Creation, but clearly there was a precedent light, a foundational light. All else in Creation emerged from this light.
We can discern (!) something of the essence of original light, including the likelihood that it was not created to enable us to see—it was created as an environment that would enable us to exist. But what can we make of its opposite, outer darkness? How can we move along the continuum from darkness to light, and how might our state of existence change as we do so?
Robin: Perhaps this light emanates from God himself, who entered into a place of utter darkness and lit it up.
Don: I think that would be the outer darkness, void and lacking form.
David: Science agrees with this explanation! Big Bang theory posits that the universe began out of an infinitely small point (some call it a “Singularity”)—essentially, a formless void of absolute nothingness—which exploded and expanded in a form of “light” we can still detect today. It is called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and its discovery has enabled us to calculate the approximate age of the universe. As this light expanded it cooled, and the cooling brought together subatomic particles to form atoms and brought together atoms to form molecules. In a manner of speaking, the Sun and the moon and the stars were indeed formed several celestial days after the original light shined forth. The CMB indeed is a remnant of that Light of Creation.
What science can’t explain is the weeping and gnashing of teeth in an outer darkness—an utter Nothingness—where teeth and tears cannot possibly have existed.
Don: There is a point at which the Light becomes blinding. Saul was overcome by it on his way to Damascus. Perhaps the spiritual analogy is that God is light so bright we cannot see him. Moses was warned he would die if God were to reveal himself as Moses wanted.
Anonymous: With eyes capable of handling only a limited amount of light and knowing therefore that there is light too bright for eyes to handle, we have to start seeing things in that higher spectrum through faith.
Jay: It seems depressing that we exist in a place of relative darkness and must, like Sisyphus rolling his rock, continually re-affirm our faith that a light too bright for us to see exists in a region of the spectrum that, on the face of it, just seems dark to us.
Donald: God is energy and the source of light. The Sun gets its energy and its ability to light our world from this same source—the Sun is not itself the original source of light. In photography, we talk of regions of the spectrum that are too bright or too dark as over-exposure and under-exposure. In between is the bandwidth we have to work with.
Don: The eyes of Man were opened after eating the Forbidden Fruit. What were they opened to? What were they still blind to? It seems to me that Fallen Man is incapable of self-assessment, yet we have had a deep and abiding desire to self-assess ever since Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and sought to cover their nakedness. God was shocked. It was and remains his prerogative to judge our nakedness. He provided, and still provides, an all-embracing environment of grace that does away with the need for self-assessment on our part. Blindness that is spiritually profitable is the blindness that blocks our self-assessment and replaces it with the grace of God. Blindness that is not profitable presents a false picture of self worth while hiding God’s grace from us.
Jay: Scripture focuses on moving from darkness to light, from blindness to sight. If there is a form of blindness/darkness which is spiritually profitable, why doesn’t scripture talk about it? Or does it?
Robin: I think it does. Before he became Paul, Saul had all the education that could be afforded at that time. The Messiah had come but Saul had not accepted him and had even taken part in the stoning of Stephen. He was fully convinced of the purity of his religion, and saw Christianity as trying to destroy Judaism. Because Saul had such strong education and knowledge and intellect, God had to do something drastic to get him to see himself spiritually as God saw him, and he did so by taking his sight and making him formally dependent on something other than himself.
Don: Profitable blindness is blindness to our own ego. We tend to exaggerate our goodness—and our badness. We are what God says we are—his sons and daughters. The opening of the eyes that is required to see this is—as Jesus did to the blind man—opening them to the grace of God. It’s a mandatory refocusing of the spiritual vision away from our own self-assessment and toward acceptance of God’s verdict that we are sinners in need of his grace—which is there for us.
Anonymous: Our evaluation of not just ourselves but also of God needs to change. After the Fall, Adam and Eve seemed to be afraid of God and became blind to his grace. To this day we tend to view God as a fierce judge. We understand that if we don’t keep the law—the Ten Commandments—we deserve to be punished. Living in fear of the law and of God is to be blind. When Jesus came, he came full of grace and truth, as the Bible says. The older generations were blind to God’s grace. Jesus came as a light to make God’s grace visible and to change people’s ideas about God.
Chris: We are blind in total darkness and in total brightness. In both cases there is no connection with God but in the case of total brightness we may think there is; we may think we know the truth about God and at the same time be blinded to our fellow Man since we seem to have light to judge them by. So spiritual blindness does not follow the normal physics of light and dark and we need to be careful when making that equation.
Donald: Film and the digital sensor which has largely replaced it have limited capacity. They may receive either not enough light (under-exposed) or too much (over-exposed). The camera aperture is widened or narrowed to allow the proper amount of light to reach the film/sensor. What was the relationship of Adam and Eve built upon prior to the Fall and the advent of sin? Did they have any light? Were they over- or under-exposed? After the Fall they saw their nakedness and felt uncomfortable. Were they too spiritual — too over-exposed, spiritually? To try to keep gathering knowledge works against plain old faith.
David: To me, that is the crux of the issue. “Profitable” blindness is a lack of discernment—an under-exposure. That is not to say it is a failure or a refusal to discern. The question of what Adam and Eve saw or discerned before the Fall can be answered by inference from what Adam and Eve saw and heard (discerned) after the Fall. After the Fall, they heard God walking in the Garden. That meant they were separated from him. By inference, before the Fall, they were never separate: They were One, a unity. They were always together. As such, they were not discernible because, logically (or so it seems to me), discernment cannot exist inside or outside a unity that is the only unity in existence—there is nothing to be discerned. But because of the disunity that followed the Fall we can infer (discern) the make-up of the unity from its separate, disunited, components. Chief among those components were Good and Evil. So as part of the unity before the Fall, Adam and Eve were no more able to discern God and Goodness than they were able to discern the Devil and Evil and their nakedness. Yet it seems to me, from my interpretation of scripture, that this unity of Good and Evil is the state whose passing God laments and to whose reinstatement God is committed. I see it, but I don’t get it, and doubt I ever will—intellectually.
Jay: Oneness with God and lack of discernment seem to involve more darkness than light. Yet there is no doubt that light is fundamental, as we saw from its declaration by God as the very first act of the Creation. Can oneness with God—can discernment—take place in the light?
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