Tractates on the Gospel of John 35.1–35.9

Those of you who were present yesterday remember that there was a long discussion of the words of our Lord Jesus Christ where he says, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” And if we wanted to discuss that light further, we could speak long; for we cannot explain it briefly. So, my brothers, let us follow Christ, the light of the world, so that we may not walk in darkness. The darkness to be feared is that of morals, not of eyes; and if of eyes, not the outer but the inner, by which is discerned not white and black but just and unjust.

When our Lord Jesus Christ had said these things, then, “the Jews answered, You bear witness of yourself; your witness is not true.” Before our Lord Jesus Christ came, he lit and sent ahead of himself many prophetic lamps. Of these was John the Baptist too, to whom the very great light itself, which is the Lord Christ, bore such witness as to no one else among men; for he said, “Among those born of women there has not arisen one greater than John the Baptist.” Yet this man, than whom no one was greater among those born of women, says of the Lord Jesus Christ, “I indeed baptize you in water; but he who comes is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to loose.” See how the lamp submits itself to the day. That John himself was a lamp the Lord himself testifies: “He was,” he says, “a burning and shining lamp; and you were willing for an hour to rejoice in his light.” But when the Jews said to the Lord, “Tell us, by what authority do you do these things?”, the Lord, knowing that they held John the Baptist to be great, and that he whom they held to be great had borne witness to them about the Lord, answered them: “I too will ask you one question: tell me, the baptism of John, where is it from? From heaven, or from men?” Troubled, they reasoned among themselves that if they said, “From men,” they could be stoned by the crowd, which believed John to be a prophet; if they said, “From heaven,” he would answer them: He whom you confess to have had prophecy from heaven bore witness to me, and from him you heard by what authority I do these things. So they saw that whichever of these they answered, they would fall into a snare; and they said, “We do not know.” And the Lord said to them, “Neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things.” I do not tell you what I know, because you will not confess what you know. Most justly rebuffed, they went away confounded; and what God the Father says through the prophet in the Psalm was fulfilled: “I have prepared a lamp for my Christ” (that is, John himself); “his enemies I will clothe with confusion.”

So the Lord Jesus Christ had the witness of the prophets sent before him, the heralds going before the judge; he had witness from John; but he himself was the greater witness, which he bore to himself. But they, with weak eyes, were seeking lamps, because they could not bear the day. For John the apostle himself, whose Gospel we have in hand, says of John at the beginning of his Gospel: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for witness, to bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness of the light. That was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into the world.” If every man, then John too. Hence John himself also says, “We have all received of his fullness.” Distinguish these things, then, so that your mind may make progress in the faith of Christ, lest you always be infants seeking the breast and shrinking from solid food. You ought to be nourished and weaned with your holy mother, the Church of Christ, and come to more solid food, with the mind, not the belly. Distinguish this, then: the light that enlightens is one thing, what is enlightened another. For our eyes too are called lights; and each one swears thus, touching his eyes, by his lights: “As my lights may live”—it is a common oath. If these lights are lights, let light be lacking in your closed bedroom; let them be open and shine for you: they surely cannot. So, just as these in our face which we have and call lights, both when they are healthy and when they are open, need the help of light from outside, and when it is taken away or not brought in, they are healthy, they are open, and yet they do not see; so our mind, which is the eye of the soul, unless it is irradiated by the light of truth and wonderfully illumined by him who enlightens and is not enlightened, will be able to come neither to wisdom nor to justice. For to live justly is our very way. But how can one not stumble on the way, for whom the light does not shine? And so on such a way there is need to see; on such a way to see is a great thing. For Tobit had his eyes closed in his face, and the son gave his hand to the father; the father showed the son the way by instructing him.

So “the Jews answered, You bear witness of yourself; your witness is not true.” Let us see what they hear; let us too hear, but not as they did: they despising, we believing; they wanting to kill Christ, we desiring to live through Christ. Meanwhile let this difference distinguish our ears and minds, and let us hear what the Lord answered the Jews. “Jesus answered and said to them, Even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true; for I know where I came from and where I am going.” Light shows both other things and itself. You light a lamp, for example, to look for a tunic, and the burning lamp enables you to find the tunic: do you light the lamp to see the burning lamp? A burning lamp is fit both to lay bare other things that were covered by darkness and to show itself to your eyes. So too the Lord Christ distinguished between his faithful and the hostile Jews as between light and darkness: as between those whom he flooded with the ray of faith and those whose closed eyes he flowed around. For this sun too lights up the face both of one who sees and of a blind man: both, standing alike and having their faces toward the sun, are lit up in the flesh, but not both are enlightened in their sight; the one sees, the other does not see; the sun is present to both, but one is absent to the present sun. So too the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, is present everywhere, because truth is everywhere, wisdom is everywhere. One man in the east understands justice; another in the west understands justice: is the justice that one understands different from the justice the other understands? They are separated in body, and they have the gaze of their minds on one thing. The justice that I, placed here, see, if it is justice, a just man sees, separated from me in the flesh by I know not how many stages, and joined in the light of that justice. So the light bears witness to itself: it opens healthy eyes, and is itself its own witness, so that it may be known as light. But what do we do about unbelievers? Is it not present to them? It is present to them too; but they do not have eyes of the heart with which to see it. Hear the sentence pronounced about them from the Gospel itself: “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” So the Lord says, and says truly, “Even if I bear witness of myself, my witness is true; for I know where I came from and where I am going.” He wished the Father to be understood; the Son was giving glory to the Father. The equal glorifies him by whom he was sent: how much ought man to glorify him by whom he was created?

“I know where I came from and where I am going.” He who speaks to you in your presence has what he did not leave, and yet he came: for in coming he did not depart from there, nor in returning did he forsake us. Why do you marvel? He is God. This cannot be done by a man; it cannot be done by the sun itself. When it goes to the west, it leaves the east, and until it returns to rise in the east, it is not in the east. But our Lord Jesus Christ both came and is there, and returns and is here. Hear the evangelist himself saying in another place, and if you can, grasp it; if you cannot, believe: “No one,” he says, “has ever seen God, except the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father; he has declared him.” He did not say, “was in the bosom of the Father,” as though by coming he had left the Father's bosom. He was speaking here and saying that he was there; and when about to depart from here, what did he say? “See, I am with you until the end of the world.”

So the witness of the light is true, whether it shows itself or other things; for without light you cannot see light, and without light you cannot see anything else that is not light. If light is fit to show the things that are not lights, does it fail in itself? Does it not lay itself open, without which other things cannot be open? The prophet spoke the truth; but where would he have it from, unless he drew it from the fountain of truth? John spoke the truth; but ask him from where he spoke: “We have all,” he says, “received of his fullness.” So our Lord Jesus Christ is fit to bear witness to himself. But clearly, my brothers, in the night of this world let us listen attentively to prophecy too; for our Lord willed to come humbly to our frailty and to the inmost nocturnal darkness of our heart. He came as man, to be despised and honored, to be denied and confessed: despised and denied by the Jews, honored and confessed by us; to be judged and to judge: to be judged unjustly, to judge justly. He came as such, then, that a lamp had to bear witness to him. For what need was there for John, as a lamp, to bear witness to the day, if the day itself could be seen by our weakness? But we could not: he became weak for the weak; through weakness he healed weakness; through mortal flesh he took away the death of the flesh; from his body he made an eye-salve for our eyes. Since, then, the Lord has come, and we are still in the night of the world, we must also listen to the prophecies.

For by prophecy we refute the pagans who contradict us. “Who is Christ?” says the pagan. We answer him: the one whom the prophets foretold. And he: “What prophets?” We recite Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and the other holy prophets; we say how long before him they came, by how long a time they preceded his coming. This, then, is our answer: the prophets went before him; they foretold that he would come. One of them answers, “What prophets?” We recite those who are recited to us daily. And he: “Who are these prophets?” We answer: those who also foretold the things we see happening. And he: “You,” he says, “have made these things up for yourselves; you saw them happen, and you wrote them down in whatever books you wished, as though they had been foretold as things to come.” Here, against our pagan enemies, the witness of other enemies comes to our aid. We bring out the books from the Jews and answer: Surely both you and they are enemies of our faith. That is why they have been scattered among the nations: so that we may refute some enemies by others. Let the book of Isaiah be brought out from the Jews; let us see whether I do not read there, “As a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer was voiceless, so he did not open his mouth. In humility his judgment was taken away; by his bruise we have been healed. All we like sheep have gone astray, and he was delivered up for our sins.” See one lamp. Let another be brought out; let the Psalm be opened; let the passion of Christ foretold there too be recited: “They pierced my hands and my feet; they numbered all my bones; but they looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among them, and upon my vesture they cast lots. My praise is with you; in the great church I will confess to you. All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship in his sight; for the kingdom is the Lord's, and he will rule over the nations.” Let the one enemy blush, because another enemy supplies me with the book. But see, by books brought out by one enemy I have defeated the other; and let not the one who brought me the book be left alone: let something be brought out by him by which he too may be defeated. I read another prophet, and I find the Lord speaking to the Jews: “I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord, nor will I accept sacrifice from your hands; for from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice is offered to my name.” You do not come, O Jew, to the pure sacrifice; I convict you of being impure.

See, the lamps too bear witness to the day because of our weakness, because we cannot endure and see the brightness of the day. For we Christians ourselves, in comparison with unbelievers, are already light; hence the apostle says, “For you were once darkness, but now light in the Lord; walk as sons of light”; and elsewhere he said, “The night is far gone, but the day has drawn near; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us walk honestly as in the day.” Yet because, in comparison with that light to which we shall come, even the day in which we are is still night, hear the apostle Peter. He says that a voice was borne to the Lord Christ from the magnificent glory: “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. This voice,” he says, “we heard borne from heaven, when we were with him on the holy mountain.” But because we were not there and did not then hear that voice from heaven, Peter himself says to us, “And we have the more sure prophetic word.” You did not hear the voice borne from heaven, but you have the more sure prophetic word. For the Lord Jesus Christ, foreseeing that there would be certain ungodly men who would slander his miracles by attributing them to magic arts, sent the prophets ahead. For if he was a magician and by magic arts brought it about that he was worshiped even when dead, was he a magician before he was born? Hear the prophets, O dead man, breeding worms by your slander, hear the prophets: I read, hear those who came before the Lord. “We have,” says the apostle Peter, “the more sure prophetic word, to which you do well to attend, as to a lamp in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

When, then, our Lord Jesus Christ comes, and, as the apostle Paul also says, “brings to light the hidden things of darkness and makes manifest the thoughts of the heart, so that each may have praise from God,” then, with such a day present, lamps will not be needed: the prophet will not be read to us, the book of the apostle will not be opened, we shall not require the witness of John, we shall not need the Gospel itself. So all the Scriptures will be taken out of the way, which were lit for us like lamps in the night of this world, so that we might not remain in darkness. When all these have been taken away, so that they no longer shine for us as if we needed them, and the men of God themselves, through whom these were ministered, see with us that true and clear light, when these helps have been removed, then, what shall we see? From what will our mind be fed? From what will that gaze rejoice? From where will that joy come which “eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it ascended into the heart of man”? What shall we see? I beg you, love with me, run with me by believing; let us desire the homeland above, let us sigh for the homeland above, let us feel that we are sojourners here. What shall we see then? Let the Gospel say now: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” You will come to the fountain from which dew was sprinkled on you; you will see the light itself bare, from which a ray was sent to you by slanting and winding ways into your dark heart, the light for seeing and bearing which you are being cleansed. “Beloved,” as I mentioned yesterday too, John himself says, “we are sons of God, and it has not yet appeared what we shall be; we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” I feel your affections being lifted up with me to things above; but “the body which is corrupted weighs down the soul, and the earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks many things.” I too am about to put down this book, and you are all about to leave, each to his own affairs. It has been good for us in the common light; we have rejoiced well, we have exulted well; but when we part from one another, let us not depart from him.