I AM the Light of the World
“All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:3-5)
Jesus is the light of the world, the light of the human race.
Jesus is I AM. He is in the Father, and the Father is in Him, and the Holy Spirit emanates from them both. Jesus is wholly human and wholly God.
The human person of Jesus is endlessly attractive, enigmatic, and compelling. Never will we comprehend him completely.
The divine Son of God is comprehensively beyond our ken. All that we know of Him comes from what He has told us about Himself.
Being did not emerge from nothingness on its own; creation cannot be its own creator. The Logos of light ignited the night in a reasoned plan of creation. The universe burst out into being at the illuminated word of the Word.
Without Jesus who is God, who is Logos, there is no light – basically because there would be no universe of limitless celestial lights. But if we imagine, for the sake of the following argument, that the universe was called into being, yet that Jesus had not come into the world, we can see that all persons would be dwelling in uninterrupted darkness with no hope: all tunnel and no light at its end.
Now, before creating the world, God created the order of spiritual beings. Lucifer was the most lucent, yet so enamored of his brightness that he identified with the light and forgot that it was created by God and was only a gift to him.
Angels, you see, are not cute, winged children. They are vast and awful in power, endowed with capacities of intelligence and will beyond those of human beings. Lucifer descended into demonic darkness, yet he did not – not yet – lose his power to deceive, to seek to draw others away from the light of God and into the black hole of non-being.
Adam and Eve surely knew better. Adam would have known the devious and corrupted nature of Satan when he first saw his shadowed slithering intrusion into the immense gardens of the Lord. He would have named him, and I assume Adam at first opposed him and sought to drive him from the blessed fields, and from his wife. Adam had access to resources more powerful than the prodigious preternatural abilities he had been given. He had access to the greatest angels, and to the Lord who walked in person in the fields and woods with Adam and Eve. But, alas, he fell, like Satan, and like we continue to do. Adam fell into infatuation with the great yet limited powers he wielded, and he imagined himself capable of and deserving of more, yet only, I suppose, because his resolve had been eroded by the darkening deceit of the evil one.
Jesus came gradually into the world following the disaster in Eden. He slowly prepared ways for us to recognize Him, and the difference between the true light that enlightens everyone and foolish darkness that proudly struts about as if it were illumination.
Without the divine person who is Jesus we would have had no Bible, no Old or New Testaments, no Hebrews and no Christianity. Aristotle would have been lost because there would have been no European Christian monastic tradition that kept alive awareness of his writings. With no Jesus there would be no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Catholic Church, no Eucharist. There would be no world-wide system of university education if it had not been initiated early on by Christendom, therefore no systems of science. The darkness in which we all would dwell if there was no Jesus is too terrible to imagine.
But that does not stop or slow the headlong rush of humanity from trying to ignore the true and objective light that is an expression of divine love, and to seek to replace He who is the light of the world with the prideful self-deception of thinking there is no objective standard, no divine creator, just us flexing our imagined self-created freedom – a farce of freedom which is simply a fetter of shadowy links – sinking us lower under the control of the evil one who never has stopped parading as a substitute for the genuineness of the human and divine one who is the real and true light of the world.
Jesus draws all persons to the light of love in endlessly individual and creative ways, and his calling is not limited to Jews or Christians but is communicated to all of His children who journey through the tragically wounded and dimmed landscape of a world ruled by the prince of darkness. But fear not! Darkness is only an absence, and there is no absence in Jesus – His light shines in the darkness.
copyright 2025 Tom Medlar
Edited by Sarah Pedrozo
She opens with brief paragraphs that generally describe each of the four. Then she jumps right into the saints and why she thinks a specific saint owns that particular temperament. This method of organization speaks to the point of the title, but at times, particularly in the chapters on St. Francis de Sales and St. Peter, while enjoyable, can be confusing and repetitive. In both, she moves on to address other saints of the same temperament, perhaps to give additional examples of the trait, but sometimes it sounds as though she is trying to force the saint to fit the trait. St. Francis de Sales is described as “Melancholic-Choleric” in the chapter title and she spends the first few pages talking about the Choleric disposition. She notes, however, that, upon studying his life and words, Choleric is the least of his traits. To her point, she impresses upon the reader that, ideally, we want to become a balance of the best of all four traits, which St. Francis de Sales achieved through a great deal of prayer, intention, and work.
