Sermon preached in Lisburn Cathedral on 4th October 2026
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be now and always acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Over these weeks we have been looking together at some of the great claims Jesus makes about himself in John’s Gospel.
And these claims matter because they take us right to the heart of the most important question we can ask:
Who is Jesus?
Not simply: What did Jesus teach?
Not: Was Jesus a good man?
Not even: Do I like what Jesus says?
But who is he?
Because if Jesus is who he claims to be, then that changes everything.
And this morning we come to another of those extraordinary claims.
Jesus says:
“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Have you ever been in a dark place? How did it feel?
Darkness
<Zambia Story> Copper Mines
The setting
The setting of this passage is important.
We’re around the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Feast of Booths.
It was one of the great Jewish festivals, when the people remembered God’s provision for Israel in the wilderness.
And light formed part of the celebration.
Later Jewish tradition describes enormous golden lampstands being lit in the Temple courts.
The Mishnah describes their light illuminating Jerusalem.
Imagine that.
The Temple sitting high above the city and these enormous lamps burning through the darkness.
Just to give us some sense of scale, the tower and spire of Lisburn Cathedral together are around 95 feet high. But the tower is around 75 apprently same size as these
So imagine enormous lights burning high above the Temple courts, visible across Jerusalem.
And those lights weren’t simply decorative.
For the people of Israel, light was full of meaning.
It recalled the pillar of fire by which God led his people through the wilderness.
It spoke of the presence of God.
It pointed towards God's promises.
Isaiah 60 says:
“Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the Lord rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.
Nations will come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”
And it is into that world, with all of those images and promises in people’s minds, that Jesus stands and declares:
“I am the light of the world.”
Notice what he doesn’t say.
He doesn’t say, “I can show you some light.”
He doesn’t say, “I’ve got some helpful teaching that might make life a little brighter.”
He doesn’t even say, “I know the way towards the light.”
He says:
“I am the light of the world.”
And not simply the light of Jerusalem.
Not simply the light of Israel.
The light of the world.
That’s an extraordinary claim.
Who is Jesus?
Light and darkness run right through John’s Gospel.
Right back at the beginning, in John chapter 1, John tells us:
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.”
And:
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
So when Jesus says, “I am the light of the world,” this isn’t an isolated illustration.
John wants us to understand something about the identity of Jesus.
This is who he is.
And that explains what happens next in our passage.
The religious leaders challenge him.
Essentially they say: You are appearing as your own witness. Why should we believe you?
And notice some of the language running through the passage:
• Witness.
• Testimony.
• Judgment.
• Judge.
• Identity.
It has almost the feel of a courtroom.
The question being examined is:
Who is this man?
Can his testimony be trusted?
Where has he come from?
Who sent him?
Who is his Father?
And Jesus keeps bringing them back to his relationship with the Father.
He knows where he has come from.
He knows where he is going.
He knows the Father who sent him.
And therefore his claim to be the Light of the World is rooted in his identity.
This isn’t Jesus simply offering people a philosophy for living.
He is revealing who he is.
And that matters enormously.
Because Christianity ultimately stands or falls on Jesus’ Identity .
A difficult verse
And that brings us to one of the hardest verses in this passage.
Jesus says:
“If you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.”
That’s jarring.
It jars against our twenty-first-century instincts.
We live in a world which often says: Believe whatever you want. Find whatever works for you. All roads ultimately amount to much the same thing.
But Jesus doesn’t speak like that.
He makes an enormous claim about himself.
He says that our response to him matters.
And the people listening to Jesus understood just how significant his claims were-which is precisely why they challenged him.
They knew he wasn’t merely saying, “Here’s another way of looking at life.”
He was claiming an identity and an authority which demanded a response.
And ultimately each one of us has to wrestle with that same question:
Who is Jesus?
Some of us here this morning have been following Jesus for many years.
We know him as Lord. We’ve entrusted our lives to him. And we’re trying-sometimes successfully and sometimes rather imperfectly-to make daily decisions which keep us close to him.
Others may be on a journey with all of this.
You’re asking questions.
Does this stand up?
Can I trust Jesus?
What would it actually mean for me to follow him?
And if that’s you, keep asking the questions.
Look at Jesus.
Look at his words.
Look at his actions.
Look at the cross.
Look at the resurrection.
Because Christianity isn’t asking us simply to believe an idea.
It is inviting us to encounter a person.
When darkness isn’t physical
But there may be others here for whom my question at the beginning-“Have you ever been in a dark place?”-immediately meant something completely different.
Because perhaps you have been in a dark place.
Perhaps you are in one now.
And changing the light bulb isn’t going to solve it.
Darkness can come in many forms.
Loss.
Uncertainty.
Fear.
Loneliness.
A relationship which has broken down.
A future which suddenly looks very different from the one we expected.
Questions we can’t answer.
Prayers which don’t seem to have been answered.
And sometimes Christian people can be far too quick to offer easy answers to difficult darkness.
Jesus does not promise here that those who follow him will never experience difficulty.
He doesn’t say that Christians will never grieve.
Or never struggle.
Or never become frightened.
His promise is much deeper:
“Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
In other words, we do not walk through the darkness alone.
Sometimes the light of Christ completely changes our circumstances.
But sometimes something else happens.
The circumstances haven’t changed yet-but suddenly we know who is with us.
A bit like that lift in Zambia.
When the churchwarden stepped into that lift, we were still hundreds of feet underground.
We were still going down.
It was still dark.
Nothing about our immediate circumstances had changed.
But now we knew something we hadn’t known before.
We understood where we were going.
And that changed how we experienced the journey.
There will be moments in the Christian life when faith looks something like that.
We don’t understand everything.
We can’t see very far ahead.
We may not even understand why the journey seems to be taking us further down rather than up.
But Christ says:
I am the Light of the World.
Follow me.
Trust me.
Walk with me.
We need light every day
And there is one final thing I want us to notice.
We don’t only need light when life becomes difficult.
We need light every day.
We need Christ on the wonderful days.
We need Christ on the terrible days.
But we also need Christ on the completely ordinary Tuesday afternoon when nothing particularly dramatic is happening.
Because following Jesus isn’t an emergency service we call when everything else has gone wrong.
It is a relationship.
It is walking in his light.
It is allowing his words to shape our decisions.
His character to shape our character.
His priorities to shape our priorities.
His love to shape how we treat the people around us.
And so perhaps there are three very simple questions for us to take away this morning.
Firstly: Who is Jesus to me?
Not simply who does the Church say he is?
Not who did my parents say he was?
But have I recognised him as the Light of the World and entrusted my life to him?
Secondly: Where do I need his light at the moment?
Perhaps there is something you are carrying this morning which feels very dark.
You don’t need a simplistic answer.
But perhaps you need to hear again the promise of Christ:
You are not walking there alone.
And perhaps, like that churchwarden appearing unexpectedly in a lift deep underground, we need to allow other people to bring something of the light of Christ into our darkness too.
To pray with us.
To listen.
To walk alongside us.
To remind us of things which, in the darkness, we struggle to see for ourselves.
And thirdly: Where can I carry Christ’s light this week?
Into our homes.
Our workplaces.
Our schools.
Our streets.
Our friendship groups.
Our communities here in Lisburn.
There are people around us walking through darkness.
We don’t need to pretend that we can solve everything.
We can’t.
But we can point towards the one who says:
“I am the light of the world.”
The one whom John tells us shines in the darkness.
The one whom the darkness has not overcome.
The one who knows where he has come from.
The one who knows where he is going.
And the one who calls us simply:
Follow me.
And perhaps this morning, wherever you find yourself-whether life feels wonderfully bright, painfully dark, or simply very ordinary-the invitation of Jesus is the same:
Come into the light.
Walk in the light.
And carry that light into the world.
Let us pray.
No comments:
Post a Comment