Why display lights for Christmas? – Christmas 2022, Part 1

One of the reasons I enjoy driving on a clear evening during the holidays is that there are so many Christmas lights out.  In my opinion, LED technology has enhanced Christmas lights.  They are precise and bright and fairly inexpensive. 

There are people who put candles in their windows, or throw a few lights around their trees or bushes. There are those lasers that shine sparkles or a moving image across an entire side or front of a house.  Some of the most impressive lights, to me at least, are the ones that illuminate trees by stringing lights across many of the tree’s branches, so that the lights look like the shape of a tree. 

At my house we just twirl a few strings of lights on the front porch posts.  We only had enough to wrap three of our four posts, and that looked dumb, so we went out and got another string of lights.  We made a basic effort. 

There are people, though, who take it to another level.  The have their whole home illuminated, or with lights flashing and changing color in tune with music.  Other people have started using projectors to add images, or even drones, all controlled by computers, like this one:

Christmas is a season of light.  And for good reason. 

Prior to the Advent Season, on the blog we have been studying the life of Jesus as told in the book of the Bible titled “The Gospel of John.”  Gospel means “Good News.”  So the Gospel of John is a story of the Good News about Jesus. The question we’ve been attempting to answer throughout that blog series is: Who is Jesus? 

On the blog next week, we’re going to resume our study the Gospel of John, trying to answer that question.  The guy that wrote the book, the Gospel of John, we believe, is the Apostle John who was one of Jesus’ followers and closest friends.  He was an eyewitness to Jesus’ life.  But why did John write about what he saw, when there were three other people who had written about Jesus many years before?

The titles of those other books are the Gospels, the Good News, about Jesus, as written by Matthew, Mark and Luke.  Those three have a lot of similarities to one another.  If you read Matthew Mark and Luke, you’ll notice that they tell many of the same stories about Jesus, often in the same order sometimes even using the same words.  So John comes along years later, and it seems he wants to tell different stories about his friend.  New stories.  Yes, there are a few that John retells that had already been told by Matthew, Mark and Luke, but many are different, new. 

For instance, John doesn’t mention anything about Jesus’ birth.  You could say he skips the Christmas story and begins when Jesus was an adult.  But that’s only partially true. In John chapter 1, verse 4, John says something very Christmas-like:

“In Jesus was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” 

John is talking about Jesus here, and his comment about Jesus being the light is very interesting.  Jesus is the light, a light shining in the darkness.  But what does that mean? 

We try to answer that question in the next post.

Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash