4th Sunday Lent, Year B

With the dawn of digital photography and as photographers perfect the art, we have the ability to create some stunning photography and cinematography. What is amazing to me, and something I find fascinating, is the whole process of colorization to black and white or sepia photography. I’m not a photographer. I am still in the $60 GE point and shoot phase of photography, but I really admire those who do it well. What is so neat about colorization is that you see a deeper reality of the image – you see its true self.

I think many of us have seen digitally re-mastered movies that were either once black and white or antiquated looking and now is bright, bold and crisp. Actors and scenes we only knew through a colorless lens, now takes on a whole new personality and presence. Pictures of people like Abe Lincoln and others who only had their portraits taken before the dawn of color photography now are truly known to us in a whole new context. If you have never seen a color image of Abe Lincoln, look it up online, it really in neat.

What is also a fascinating technique is the contrast of black and white with color. There are black and white images of flowers with one flower in yellow petals. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this technique is from the movie Schindler’s List where we see a little girl at the concentration camp wearing a red coat walking with her family. It’s a black and white film and the only color we see is that red coat. Sadly in the end, we see the red coat of the girl again, but among the deceased.

The use of color and non-color is powerful to us and can convey greater emotions, truths and realities about the subject. Adding color or partial color to a photograph of film brings it to a new context for us and we see it and experience it in new ways.

“The Light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to Light, because their works were evil”.

John is telling us this weekend that the Light has come into the world to shed its rays in the darkness of our lives and to illumine and bring hope and meaning to the darkness we inhabit. The Light came into the world to save us from our darkness and bring us into the warmth, security and hope of His Light.

But, as Chronicles laments, we kept adding infidelity to infidelity and rejected the Light and remained in the darkness.

What does this mean for us?

The Father sent us His only Son into the world to save the world through the Light of His Love. This Light is to illumine all our sinfulness, our waywardness, our grief and our doubts. His Light is to be the source of knowledge, truth and wisdom. His Light is to bring us hope and joy in the midst of a troubled world. His Light is to bring new meaning and depth to a seamlessly cold and black existence.

The Light came to color our world, to color our lives, to enhance our relationship with our God.

All of us experience ‘black and white” I our lives quite often. In the midst of so many challenges, sorrows and hardships, life appears rather colorless and bleak – anything but hopeful or meaningful.

But what Christ has done for us is come into the world to bring us His Light and all that it entails and means for our lives. His Light was brought into the world precisely so our lives will no longer remain black and white images, but colorful and powerful expressions of the Love of God!

Is it always easy? Certainly not. Will we always see the Light? Probably not. Is the Light always there? Absolutely. It is always there waiting to break through the darkness of our sins, our grief, doubts, despair and hardships.

If there is Light, there must also be darkness. But, we do not have to let the darkness conquer or snuff the Light. It is our challenge in our relationship with God and as pilgrims on the journey to color our hearts and lives with that Light of the Son.

This Lent ought to be a time where we purposefully endure and experience the darkness. We are called to be out in the desert thirsty, hungry and alone so that we can come to know the power and our dependence on the Light. I challenge each of us to let us enter more and more into the Lenten sacrifice so that when Easter comes, we will glory in the Light of the Son!