We close our 2025 Daily Meditations reflecting on what “being salt and light” means for Christians and all people of good will. Father Richard Rohr writes:
Have you ever noticed that the expression “the light of the world” is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), while Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world.”)
Apparently, light is less something we see directly, and more something by which we see all other things. In other words, we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ. That is the goal. Jesus Christ seems quite happy to serve as a conduit, rather than a provable conclusion. (If the latter was the case, the incarnation of Jesus would have happened after the invention of the camera and the video recorder!) We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world with his kind of eyes. The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else. In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us.
That might just be the whole point of the Gospels. We have to trust the messenger before we can trust the message, and that seems to be Jesus’s strategy. Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message. As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious substitute for actually following what Jesus taught—he asked us several times to follow him, and never once to worship him.
If we pay attention to the text, we’ll see that John’s Gospel offers a very evolutionary notion of the Christ message. Note the active verb that is used here: “The true light that enlightens every person was coming (erxomenon) into the world” (John 1:9). In other words, we’re not talking about a one-time Big Bang in nature or a one-time incarnation in Jesus, but an ongoing, progressive movement continuing in the ever-unfolding creation. Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time and will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the “second coming of Christ,” which was unfortunately read as a threat (“Wait till your dad gets home!”), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the “forever coming of Christ,” which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection.
Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail us, always demand more of us, and give us no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.
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Living in the Light of God’s Love
I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.
—John 8:12
CAC faculty member James Finley poetically envisions how Jesus is the light of the world:
Jesus reveals himself to us as the light of the world and lets us know that anyone who follows him will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.
This is what I think this light is: Jesus said, “Fear not; I’m with you always” (see Matthew 28:20). He didn’t say, “Don’t be afraid because I’ll personally see to it that nothing unfair or cruel or traumatizing happens to you.” Look what happened to him. He was crucified. God is a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. Salvation is experientially dropping down into the intimate realization of that in this way.
We live on and on in the ongoing fragility and brokenness of ourselves, but we don’t walk in the darkness that surrounds us. Rather, we live in the light that transcends, permeates, and unexplainably shines through that darkness. We walk in the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not grasp it. Although the darkness cannot grasp it, even the darkness can realize it’s being unexplainably illumined by light.
Likewise, sometimes we can get disheartened about ourselves, like Paul’s thorn in the flesh. While we need to do our best to get past the things that are hurtful to myself and others, can I place my faith in the love that’s infinitely in love with me and my inability to get past the stumbling place? As a matter of fact, the thorn in the flesh, the stumbling place, may be my teacher where I depend on the mercy of God that is oceanic and endless in all directions.
In a similar way, sometimes when we look at the world, we can get disheartened by the outcome of the world because the intensity and density closes off experiential access to this love that utterly transcends and unexplainably permeates the very suffering of the world itself, unexplainably and forever this way.
This then is our walk: How can I learn to be healed from what hinders me from being ever more habitually established in the divine light that shines, transcends, and utterly permeates the broken edges of my life? The very ragged edges of my heart are the configurations of the light that shines through the broken places as mercy, as amazement, and as gratitude.
Although I can’t experience it all the time, I know the importance of the daily rendezvous with God, the quiet space in which I become ever more receptively vulnerable to being instilled by this light that permeates and guides me through my days. Hopefully, this poetic expression then will be a way of helping us to sit with and be present to this light, shining into our own lives in the midst of the unresolved matters of our hearts.
