Description
Imagining the Lectionary: you were darkness (Lent 4A)
Reflection accompanying image “you were darkness”
For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light (Ephesians 5:8)
Having let my imagination run riot with the theme of darkness and light what is striking about this verse is the stark and unsparing declaration that once we did not simply live in darkness, we were darkness.
Consider the full implication of that for a moment. Darkness is an integral part of our personality, it is inherent in our nature. Darkness is not an external circumstance which envelops us and for which we are not responsible; it actually has its origin within us and, in a profoundly troubling social-psychological sense, emanates from us to envelop others.
This is not just a mere absence of light, it is something much more worrisome than that, akin to an inverse and anti-light energy which radiates negativity and is the very opposite of all that is positive in life. Admittedly I am talking poetry here, not physics, but, as the Bible makes very clear within its pages, the metaphor of darkness is well worth exploring.
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