Clothed in Light

Clothed in Light


Commentary on 1 John 5:1-6 

Listening to J. Vernon McGee at TTB.org has been great.  He repeats himself, and backs up, and restarts, and goes through everything in 5 years.  There is progress, but it's like driving down the road with my Grandpa, who never used turn signals because he thought it was nobody's business where he was going.  We kids, munching on granola, would be looking out the back of the car, or VW van, (that was painted with house paint of whatever colors were left over from various projects), watching the long stream of cars piling up behind us, waiting for a chance to pass.   

J. Vernon likes to go through things pretty well and not miss much.  More importantly, he wants to make sure that the audience, who hasn't been to seminary, hasn't missed much.  I wonder if he knew the phrase that states the importance of the journey rather than the destination?  He taught that way.

I used to think Mr. McGee was so old fashioned, and there is a great validity to that idea.  Listen to his voice!  He apologized a little for being country, but he's not trying to hide it or dress it up like they do in subsequent decades.  Would a man with that voice be a preacher in Los Angeles today?  He's constantly talking about "today" and although he's speaking about a few years ago, with a very old-fashioned voice and style, he's talking about what has happened somewhere in the past that could also be right here; now.  The same forces are at work.  This is a process that takes millenia.  God made the world and has brought about the forces to return the world to Himself.  But how can we even begin to understand this? 

Lately, he has been talking about three definitions of God; Light, Love and Life.  In English, they have that nice alliteration, and sound important and true.  But of course, God can't be confined to our definitions; particularly those that are so ordinary that we use the words every day.

God is Light, but also clothed in light.

What a concept.  If God is Light, how can that also be clothes for itself?  Clearly, we are dealing with ideas that are beyond us, and they're not going to be particularly logical ideas, but they will be hopefully helpful.


"Glory, beauty and dazzling splendor" are the attributes of light that will help us understand God.  Light reveals everything, except for God, who is clothed in light, and therefore, covered or obscured by it.  Apparently, light is the closest brightest thing we understand but even that is darker than God.

When I was little, saying light and dark, and words like bright, meaning good, did not bother me because I did not associate any of those words with my cousins who were darker than me.  We all were bright then.  And we all were good.  Somewhere along the way, one of my cousins decided that she didn't like the phrases in church music like "whiter than snow" meaning innocence.  She started to think that people thought she was darker than me.  I think she started to think that about herself.

This seemed like nonsense to me.  I knew that I wasn't thinking of dark people as less innocent, and I dismissed her objections.  She likes to object to things anyway, so of course if she has the opportunity to be contrary, she'll take it.   Now I see things differently, but I don't think I'm better for it.  Now when I hear a phrase about color, I think of race.  Race is arbitrary to begin with.  And color is only one way to define it.  Race isn't categorical, like male and female, but a spectrum.  We can say black and white, but who are we forgetting and how many people don't fit into either one?  Where's my cousin?  We can say red and yellow, black and white.  But we could say purple and green for how realistic and helpful these categories have been.

This is so clear to me because my cousin is lighter than I am when she hasn't been in the sun.  When we were babies and parts of us had never seen the sun, she was a different color than I, but not darker.  I was a little pinker and she was a little peachier.  But when she gets in the sun, she can become golden or bronze.  I can be pinker or redder, and a little bit browner than my normal shade.  It's what's affecting us on the outside that makes us think we're not the same.