REFLECTION OR TRANSLUCENCE


This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. 
(1 John 1: 5 – NAS)


John gets down to his message swiftly now. He announces the basics of it and the authority of it. This message was heard from Jesus Christ Himself, who is God Made Manifest. And John puts it in terms even little children can grasp: God is Light and in Him there is no darkness at all.

A few years ago, the blinds in my apartment were replaced. The old blinds were old when I moved in, and that had been many years previously. They were so ancient I never touched them as they threatened to fall apart. The slats themselves were metal, and so opaque entirely, letting neither vision nor light get by them when they were closed. And they were closed most of the time because I like my privacy, and I am light sensitive (meaning I respond to changes in light even when sleeping, which is annoying if you went to bed at 2:30 and first light starts sneaking in at 5:30).

Then the management chose to do some major maintenance on all the apartments, minor repairs and such, and so I requested new blinds. I asked for vertical blinds for the living room, as they are more like curtains for allowing variances in light. The new blinds were installed, light-weight white plastic. And they seemed to be opaque, blocking vision. And they certainly block my interior lights from spilling out into the night, when they are drawn.

But I discovered an interesting thing about the power of sunlight. Although these blinds are excellent at blocking artificial light (you can only tell if my interior lights are on if there is leakage between the slats), they are translucent to sunlight. The first morning after their installation, I was wakened by a dim light filling the whole apartment.

We all know that sunlight is powerful. But that was the first occasion in a long time that brought it home to me (so to speak). My blinds could block man-made artificial light, but sunlight was not hindered by it at all. It would still make its way into my living space. Oh, some of the effect was hampered, of course. But as soon as there was light outside in my world, as dawn began, there would be light inside my apartment to see by.

We can chalk this effect up to modern technology, of course. Metal blinds or wood blinds would have blocked everything. But once I got used to the translucence, I rather liked it. And it became a daily reminder to me of how pervasive God can be in our lives, if we let Him shine through.

John wants to make the point of the purity and holiness of God. “God is light and there is no darkness in Him.”

There is darkness of all sorts in the world, of course. Visual darkness, that keeps us from seeing things around us. Mental darkness, that keeps us from understanding things. Emotional darkness, that interferes with our relationships. John knew this as well as the next person.

But people had come, as it is human nature to do, to ask the question, “How can there be so much of this darkness, if it does not come from God Himself? Therefore there must be some darkness in God!” Human nature has not changed all that much at all, for people still  ask that question. Living within Creation, we have a hard time grasping that God is much more than the boundaries of Creation.

So John states it plainly, up-front: God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.

When we talk about being followers of Jesus, we often say things like “I want to reflect the Light of God to others.” And it can be a useful way of talking about it. Reflected light can be a very pleasing thing: we often enjoy mirrored corridors when they are lit up, and the moon when high and full in a clear night sky can be so bright as to cast strong shadows. But since the translucent blinds came into my life, I have begun to wonder about the metaphor of reflection.

Reflective surfaces are hard. The point of them is that they do not let light “get through” to whatever is behind that surface. We are all familiar with the one-way glass that gets used for police interrogation rooms. The way these function is that the treated glass acts as a mirror on one side, in a well-lit room filled with light. On the other side, the observation room is darker. This allows observers to see through the treated glass into the subject’s room. But the darkness on the other side, for the subject, keeps the glass only reflective, for no light from the other side is passing through it.

Which would I rather be like? The translucent blinds, which allow true light – sunlight – to pass through and illuminate things on the other side? Or would I rather be like the one-way glass, that reflects back the brightness on the mirror side, but requires darkness on the other?

John’s words come back to me: there is no darkness in God.

I think we are called to be translucent, not reflective. God’s light should shine from within us, whether softly (as the daylight in my apartment does when the blinds are drawn) or brightly (like when the blinds are wide open to full sunlight). I don’t think we should be lurking inside the shell of our lives in darkness, letting our hard surfaces reflect back on others the bright light of God. For we need the light as much as the next person.

This is what John learned from Jesus Himself. And surely those two are trustworthy witnesses.