St John – The Messenger of Light

St John – The Messenger of Light by Rev. Michaël Merle

​Report by John-Peter Gernaat

​The theme for this talk comes from the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Michaël began by reading a part of this Prologue from the rendition by John Madsen of the translated by Emil Bock.

​In the very beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God,
And the Word was a Divine Being.
He was in the very beginning with God.
All things came into being through him,
and nothing of all that has come into being was made except through Him.
In Him was life,
and the life was the light of human beings.
And the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not accepted it.
There was a human being,
sent from God,
his name was John.
He came to bear witness,
to witness to the light
and so, to awaken faith in all hearts.

“To witness to the light.”
.
We can thus say that the first spiritual task of St John is to be a witness to the light.

The first thing is to consider what this light is. We can consider the experience of light in the material world, the world of material existence. We will consider this and also ponder the concept, from the Prologue, that this light is the life of human beings. Light and life; life and light.

On the feast of St John the Gospel reading in the Act of Consecration of Man is from the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. This chapter introduces John on the earth involved in his task as a messenger of light. Reading from the beginning of chapter 1:

A new beginning from the realm of the angels is now through Jesus Christ in revealing the powers of spirit. As written in Isaiah, the Prophet,

Behold, I send my angel-messenger before your countenance, who will prepare your way. As the voice of one calling from all that is desolate and lonely: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, the Ruler of the innermost self; straighten his paths!’

The introduction links the idea of John with the idea of ‘angel-messenger’. In the Greek, the language in which Mark wrote his gospel, the word for ‘angel is the word for ‘messenger’: ‘Angelos’. The word persists from Greek, though Latin to English as evangel, as in evangelise, meaning ‘the good news’. The Latin ‘Evangelium’ means ‘good news’ which in the Anglo-Saxon gives us ‘Gos-pel’, gospel. We speak of spreading the Good News as evangelisation. This brings us back to the Latin, which was a transliteration of the Greek, for what it is to speak about the revelation or proclamation of the Good News. Literally, the translation would be ‘news from the realm of the messengers or angels’. It is the message of the Good News and of healing or making whole (salvation) that is contained in this expression. In the rendition by Madson of the beginning of Mark’s Gospel we hear the full meaning of what is often translated as ‘the Good News of Jesus Christ’.

St John appears as an angelic-like figure. In icons of St John one finds that he is often presented with wings. One may interpret this as meaning that after his final witnessing, his martyrdom and his beheading, he become a part of the spiritual world. This is not commonly the way that saintly people are represented in iconography. John receives wings because of this quality that he is a messenger. He is an Angelos. It is interesting that his message, as brought to us in Mark’s Gospel, and in the other Gospels, is at hand of the prophet Isaiah. However, when we read what Mark writes it is more than what the prophet Isaiah proclaimed.

“Behold, I send my messenger before you” – we can go with this translation – any messenger who comes from God, the one who sends, carries the power of an angel to proclaim the message that comes from God.

“Before your countenance…” is important because this message is delivered face-to-face.

“Who will prepare your way.” We have a way, there is a particular way of being human that we need to embrace. We are going to have to walk on this way. We are going to have to be transformed by this way. We are going to have to become out of following this way.

“As a voice of one calling from the desert.” A good translation of the Greek word for desert is ‘from all that is desolate and lonely’. Desolation – a place without the impulse of life; therefore a space without spiritual light.

“Prepare the way of the Lord.” Who is ‘the Lord’? The Lord is the ruler of the innermost self; the one who will make it possible for us to bear our ‘I’-organisation within our constitution as a human being.

“Straighter his paths!” The pathway, the way, is clear, because we can see it. Spiritually, it is straight without sudden turns.

This is not a reference to Isaiah only, if we turn to the Prophet Isaiah chapter 40. (This is a really interesting part of the Book of Isaiah. Many scripture scholars break the Book of Isaiah up into two parts. We can see that there is a different expression that comes. So, it is possible, and some scripture scholars maintain this, that we are dealing with two different prophets by the name of Isaiah. One that comes earlier, whose writings form the first part of the book, and then a prophet who comes later in the spirit of Isaiah, out of that impulse, also called Isaiah, who then proclaims a message that updates what the people have heard from the original Prophet Isaiah and this forms the second part of the book. There are other scripture scholars who feel that it is one prophet who through the experience of being a prophet undergoes a new experience, one could say, of what needs to be proclaimed and the second part of the book is written in the style of this renewed experience.) Isaiah 40 forms part of the second part of Isaiah which is often called ‘The Book of Consolation’, because it promises that God will be involved in the difficulties of being human. He will not take away the difficulties of being human, but He will empower the human being to face the difficulties and to overcome them. Isaiah 40:

A voice cries in the wilderness: “Prepare the way for Yahweh, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.

In the Hebrew it would say “for our Elohim”. This would have been spoken out of the relationship of the times between the Hebrew people and the Divine. We can hear it today as “A voice cries in the wilderness … prepare the way for God, make straight in the desert (in the lonely place, in the place of desolation, where there is an absence of life-forces) a highway, a straightway, a Way for our God”.

When we read this, we may ask: “Where is the reference to messenger or angel” as stated in Mark? The reference to the angel is not to the Prophet Isaiah, but to the Prophet Malachi. Mark is referencing three parts of scripture. Although it is predominantly carried in the passage from Isaiah. Turning to Malachi we read at the beginning of the third chapter: “Now I am sending my angel-messenger ahead of me to clear the way”.

We can consider how to translate the word that could be ‘a messenger’ or ‘an angel’. The Lord sends a being before him. What is significant in John’s Prologue is that it is a human being, that is the angelic messenger. John is a human being sent like an angel-messenger. For the first time what is being communicated directly, and not through a prophet, is communicated directly through a human being who carries the power of angelic message.

This makes John a very interesting figure.  We can see him as a messenger-being on the threshold of being. He is the last of the Old Testament prophets, and the first, and only, New Testament angelic messenger. After John, the full message is revealed in the being of Christ, incarnated into Jesus of Nazareth.

The idea of a message and of a spiritual power, an angelic messenger, going before can take us back to the Book of Exodus. In chapter 23 verse 20: “See, I am sending an angel before you to keep you safe on the way and bring you to the place I have made ready”. This is an important passage from the Pentateuch that would have lived in the souls of the Hebrew people who would have carried this as a religious tradition. When we read this with the comprehension provided by St John, we realise that the place that has been made ready is the earth. This is the place that has been made ready, and it is John who will keep us safe on the way and bring us to this place, the place where we can meet the Christ, on earth.

Having clarified John as a messenger, what does it means to be someone who carried the spiritual message from the spiritual world onto the earthly plane – from the heavens onto the earth? It means John has to remain very conscious of his connection to the spirit, of what message he is bringing and, according to the Gospel of John, he is the messenger of light. In the southern hemisphere we have a song that the children sing at this time because it is associated with the long, dark nights of winter:

St John, St John the messenger of Light, who kindles the fire in the dark earth’s night, that love may come to earth. You and I, I and you, we shall kindle our light too, for we love one another, and we love our mother, our dear mother earth.

We can come to a profound understanding of what is carried in this song.

What is it to be a messenger of light? If we are to speak of light as a physical property, physicists can tell us a lot about the connection between light and life, in terms of the manifestation of light here on earth.

We have the concept of an atom. We may never have beheld an atom, but our education has provided a concept that we hold. The word atom should be viewed as a-tom from the Greek ‘tomos’ meaning divisible and ‘a-tomos’ being indivisible. When the atom was first conceptualised, it was thought to be indivisible. We have since learned that we can split the atom and that releases vast amounts of energy. Atoms can not only be split, but on the sun, they are fused. On the sun atoms of hydrogen fuse to form an atom helium releasing light and heat into space. One of the great mysteries of the atom was resolved in the late 20th century with a new understanding that came. We have understood that an atom has protons in its centre, in its nucleus. The proton is charged, and we consider this charge to be positive. This means the electron, which is outside the nucleus, is oppositely charged. Opposite charges attract. This means the electron is held captive by the proton, by the nucleus. But why does the electron not collapse into the nucleus? This would eliminate the charges and the atom would disappear. So why does this not happen? What keeps the electron in the space it occupies about the nucleus? Physicists have discovered that every atom captures a photon of light, a particle of light. It is the photon of light that keeps the protons and the electrons apart. Physicists describe the activity of the atom as a ‘game’ of catch and release between the photon and the electron as they pass the photon of light between each other. The photon prevents the atom disintegrating, but when the atom does disintegrate the photon is released. Hence the very bright flash of light experienced by witnesses of atomic bombs.

Now we come to appreciate the enormity of light. Physicists will tell us that without light there is no life. Light holds every atom in the cosmos together.

The light of our sun provides the possibility of life on earth. It was the energy of the sun that allowed the earliest plants to photosynthesise and release oxygen into the atmosphere. Without the level of oxygen in our atmosphere today, the level of life as we know it would not be able to survive. The heat and the light of the sun lays down the possibility of life on the earth. Although this is physics, it is the manifestation of a spiritual idea. Without light there is no life and without the life of God there is no light.

In our creation story the very first thing that manifests is light. What else could manifest, because, we know from John, that God is light. God, also, is love. There is a connection between light and love, and there is a connection between light, love and life. God is light, therefore the first thing to manifest is light – the substance of God becomes apparent.

We would not be able to do anything without light. The capacity of vision comes at hand of light on a physical level.

What is the message that John brings? What is the light with which we must connect? It is the light of Christ and the light of the Divine. And we know that it is love. Going back to the song above, John kindles the light in the dark earth night so that love may come to earth.

So, we have St John as the messenger of light. What exactly is his message of light? His message of light must be a message of life. If one reads John’s Prologue he could have written:

​  In Him (the Word) was light.

This makes sense. The Word is God, the Word is with God and God is light. So, one could imagine John writing that in Him was light and the light is the life of human beings. But it is the other way around. “In him was life, and the life was the light of human beings.” This means that what St John must come and proclaim is what it means for human beings to shine light as a consequence of their life. The light of human beings is at hand of the extraordinary word John uses, the word that is poorly translated into an old English word that has lost all of its original meaning. The Greek word that says ‘change’. It is at hand of this change that light can now shine from us. Out of that change we become ready for the light of Christ in us to shine from us. We must change something in us that makes it possible for the light of Christ in us to shine forth from us, to ray forth from us, and not only into us. John’s message is to change the perception, the vision, of one’s mind and heart at hand of a new thinking, a new feeling and a new doing. This is a lot to be contained in one Greek word. This word is sometimes poorly translated as knowledge. Change your whole way of knowing. Knowing is more than just information. Change your way of understanding, grasping, comprehending, being conscious of what you are thinking, of that you are feeling and therefore of what you are going to do. Change your whole soul constitution. This is a wonderful description of the soul: the capacity to have a comprehension, a vision, a concept, a capacity for thinking, feeling and willing, that is held by a vision: a central point of knowing. This is the wonderful thing about knowledge: we think that when we have shared information, people now know. It only means that people are informed. When it becomes a reality in our conceptualisation of the world, we know because we know. It has become real for me, but I do not have the argument to convince another. Only they can know for themselves.

This is the great thing about knowledge. And this is the message of the Light of the Divine: change your way of seeing, of comprehending, understanding; change your way of knowing what you know. Then the possibility of light streaming from the human being becomes a reality.

The message of St John is a message of the Life of the Divine in us and how we have to make our souls in such a way that we can receive the Light of Christ and that we can reflect the Light of Christ. The Life of the Word becomes the light of human beings. We have a light to shine. We have to become the shining examples of Christ’s life in the world. Then we take on, not only the message of John, but the very task of John which is to be a messenger of light. We take on the activity of John by being messengers of Christ’s light when we are face-to-face with another. “Behold, I send my angel-messenger before your countenance.” Before your face! Not theoretically, practically.

World headlines give us the impression that there is no light shining in the world at this time from human hearts. And yet, that is our task, to find how the light can shine from human hearts into the world. This means there is a lot of work for us all to do.

If we do not make an effort between now and crossing the threshold, something stagnates on the path. The way in which we keep walking the path, the way in which we stay on the way makes all the difference.

It is really important that we hear in the Act of Consecration of Man more than just “walking with Christ”. This may be heard as being the way that we might walk with a friend, a beloved companion. Walking with Christ is much more than that. It is that as we walk with Christ we change. Walking on the way changes us. So, it is not that we are walking on the way, but that we are underway in the change that needs to happen for us. Thus, walking with Christ is being underway on the way with Christ. It is not just walking, it is transforming, it is about changing. It is about the new soul constitution that we need to have, because that is the constitution we can change. The only way that our soul constitution changes is when our ‘I’ is awake and conscious and active. And that is why, with his message of light, John needed to shift consciousness in the human soul. The way that he did that was through baptism.

The baptism of John was a physical way of triggering, one might say, the conscious shift in the human soul. It was the preparation for an incarnating ‘I’. The soul had to make itself open and ready to receive.

The wonderful thing about receiving love is that one cannot keep it, one must give it. Love is, by its nature, giving. We receive it because it is a gift and we must give it, because it is a gift. If one tries to hold onto it, it is not there. It is only powerful and at work when it is moving and being given. In that sense we have to work on our light, on our life, and on our love.

This message is profound:

​St John, St John the messenger of Light, who kindles the fire in the dark earth’s night that love may come to earth. You and I, I and you, we shall kindle our light too, for we love one another, and we love our mother, our dear mother earth.

This is the place that has been prepared for us: the earth, because there is no other place where the human being can learn the lesson of love, except on the earth. We can analyse it and comprehend it and consider it once we have crossed the threshold, but we can’t learn it. Life on earth is school. This is where we learn the lesson of love. We only learn it when we are giving it. This is what makes the lesson so difficult. Giving love freely is very difficult. We have a capacity to give love conditionally and occasionally. The lesson is to give love always, to everyone. This is our task. We have not only to reflect the Light of Christ, we are to become a messenger in the way we reflect that light.