Light through a window

Yes, I do windows. The lighter summer traffic at the church where I work permits a deep-down cleaning, including windows, 92 of them. It also inspires a particular kind of reflection.

Think about what a window does for a building. If not for windows, the innards of an edifice of stone would be as black as pitch. But it takes only one opening cut into it to let the light diffuse its every part—no corner or crevice of its area escapes light’s penetration. How great a darkness is dispelled by one small aperture.

Moreover, it is not even as if there is a contest between dark and light. It’s not as if sometimes the darkness wins and other times the light prevails. Dark always shrinks away from rays of sun as burglars skulk with shielded brows from searchlights that expose their secret deeds. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). What principle in the spiritual realms is duplicated in the worldly sphere for this window washer’s edification!

I know a Korean medical doctor who left life in suburbia to treat rampant eye diseases in the Masai villages outside of Nairobi, Kenya. It was a Sisyphean battle until Dr. Kim was able to persuade a few villagers to part from tradition and drill a small hole at the top of their domed cow dung huts to let the rising smoke of their cooking fires escape. I would like to have been there to see the natives’ faces when at first they lifted up their eyes and spied that pencil shaft of light that never broke the doom of life in total shadows till that day.

To prepare Jerusalem from Sennacherib’s attack, King Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 32:2-4) had two teams working on an underground tunnel connecting the Gihon spring to the Siloam pool, one group digging from the north and the other from the south. I love to think of what a celebration there was when months of darkness in those caves gave way to first the muted sounds of pick axes across a rocky membrane, and at last the glimpse of lamps of friendly men.

“The eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus says. “So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:22-23)

Again we brush against an example of one small aperture determining such fateful things as whether we live “full of light” or “full of darkness.” What is a “healthy” eye, then, and what is a “bad” one, that we may be wise and have that light? What does it mean that light in someone may be darkness? How then is it called light in any sense? I think I know: philosophy.

Now there’s a light that some invite into the window of their souls, and it suffuses the entire house and is the lamp they walk by in their daily dealings. Every love, every decision, every goal of such men is determined by that worldview. But they are doomed if this is so, for God will not be known by men’s philosophy, this much we learn from the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 1-3). Therefore, it is not even their worst traits but their best ones that doom them: Even the light in them is darkness. And it makes them blind to all the rest, for it discolors every fact and every bit of data of the senses it filters.

Jesus says we need not tend to many things but only one—to have a healthy eye—and that will be enough in life, for all good things will flow from that single correction (Ephesians 5:13)—whether we examine a dung hut floor, the walls of Hezekiah’s cave, or the plans of our own devising.

We fill up with His Word, like Mary at Jesus’ feet, to banish every rival argument that vaunts itself against that true pure light. I’d like to think that Martha put the window washing cleaner down just long enough to take a seat beside her.