Light, Truth, and Roaches

I can never read today's gospel without thinking of roaches. The rainbow haired guy with the John 3:16 sign may occur to me as well, but my first thought is roaches scurrying off a kitchen counter when someone comes in for a late night snack and flips on the lights. If you've ever lived somewhere with a roach problem, you surely know what I'm talking about.

The same passage that talks about God so loving the world also speaks of a self inflicted judgment that reminds me of roaches fleeing the light. The Gospel of John loves the metaphors of light and darkness. It speaks of Jesus as the light that has come into the world, and today Jesus notes that people often prefer the darkness, fleeing the light lest it expose them for what they really are.

I find this to be true, both individually and corporately. We all have those parts of us we don't want revealed, that we hide and do not want light illuminating them. Sometimes there is nothing more difficult for us than to stand in the bright light of truth. We prefer the images we construct to the realities of who we actually are.

I thinks this becomes magnified in groups and organizations. Groups do not like to face their failings and shortcomings. We do not like the harsh light of truth, even on events of long ago. My own native South often chooses the remember the Civil War as a war between states, and it tells the story so as to minimize the role of slavery. We struggle with the notion that the South was wrong to start the war and fought it to preserve an evil institution that denied full humanity to people because of their race. Some even insist that the reasons for the war were good and noble. We just  happened to lose.

But this is not a problem peculiar to the South. People in the North have often pointed a wagging finger at southern racism while conveniently ignoring their own history of racism.  Some people in Japan still honor the war heroes from WWII while denying horrible atrocities committed by those same heroes. And churches, well we engage in this sort of behavior, too.

Not only do we like to forget the way our churches once participated in the ills of racism, slavery, sexism, etc. (we still participate in some), but we are often very good at avoiding any significant and deep self-examination in the present. We seem content to imagine that we are in some way doing God's work, and so it must be fine. And we often get very upset if someone points out our hypocrisies or the ways we fail to incarnate Jesus to the world.

The same Jesus who is the light that people avoid because they prefer darkness, also says he comes to testify to the truth.  But light and truth scare us. Better not to look too carefully. Better not to discover that Jesus' call to repent, to turn and move in a new direction, applies to us in the church as well.

This is strange when you think about it. Jesus comes because of God's great love for us, comes to call us to the life that God hopes and dreams for us. Surely we would want the bright light of God's truth to shine on us, that we might see clearly where we have gone astray, and see clearly where Jesus is calling us to go.

Wouldn't we?

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