Jesus said to Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.” (John 3.16-20)
In 1902 Joseph Conrad, the Ukrainian-born English writer of Polish descent wrote his most famous work, The Heart of Darkness. Unable to speak English until he was in his twenties, Conrad became one of the most well-known writers of his time. The short novella that carried such an ominous title was based on his own experience as a steamboat captain who was hired to take a trip into Africa. For him, that trip exposed the horrors of colonial rule that he later fictionalized in his book.
The masterpiece tells of another riverboat captain, this one named Marlow, who journeys up the Congo River to meet with a station manager named Kurtz who lives at the innermost station. The further that Marlow goes into the interior of the Congo, the more he sees the depravity and dereliction of the colonial bosses who terrorize and treat the native peoples as subservient.
Marlow finds the trip up the river both foreboding and forbidding, like traveling back to the earth’s beginnings. The deeper he goes into the jungle the more he felt he was experiencing “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” Conrad is so skillful in describing the journey that the reader comes to feel the same fear as the darkness deepens.
The final horror awaits Marlow at his destination where he meets Kurtz, a man some called a lunatic, a man whose brutality shocked Marlow. Upon arriving at the station, the first thing Marlow sees is a decapitated head–black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids–that Kurtz has put on a pike to intimidate other natives. It is but one of many heads on poles that surround the station.
Encountering and speaking with Kurtz, Marlow comes to the conclusion that he is seeing “the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint.” The longer he stays with the man the more he is convinced that his evil was different from that which he had observed in the other company agents. “His,” Marlow said of Kurtz, “was an impenetrable darkness.” He is a man completely devoid of a moral compass.
Near the end of the story, Kurtz dies, a man sick in body as well as in soul, his final utterance two words, “the horror, the horror,” leading us to believe he has in his last moments seen the total darkness of his heart, the horror of his own actions, his life spent without any personal restraints, an existence filled with so much brutality that it has become banal. Marlow described the man in this way, “Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”
When Marlow finally makes his way back to England, he meets Kurtz’s fiancee who still mourns his death a year later. When she asks Marlow what her beloved’s final words were, he cannot find it in himself to tell her the truth, so instead chooses to tell her that the man died with her name on his lips, a kindness he showed to the grief-stricken woman, a choice to bring light into the darkness. As Marlow says at one point, “Truly I have looked into the heart of darkness but refused to yield to its paralyzing influence.”
Without question, the book is damning and dark, and the reader walks away on unsteady feet, stunned by the sight of evil as if he or she has truly come face to face with the shrieking demons of the night out to capture more souls. It is difficult to keep reading on because we know it is only going to get darker and more dreadful with each passing page. And it does.
With that introduction, ugly and unsavory as it is, we can turn to the passage of John’s gospel that we have read today, perhaps approaching it with more clarity and a greater understanding. Listening to Jesus speak to the Pharisee named Nicodemus, we see that the man of Galilee also has come to see the heart of darkness that seems to be housed in humanity.
There is something as sad and as disappointing in Jesus’ experience of the human heart as that of Conrad’s own experience, leading us to believe that Conrad has come to the same conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth did centuries before, the Englishman realizing that humanity was no closer to good in nineteenth century England than it was when Jesus walked the earth in Galilee.
The episode that serves as the backdrop of Jesus’ words that we hear today centers on Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish leadership who comes to Jesus with questions and concerns. His interest in Jesus is genuine, even if his understanding of Jesus’ words is slow. He tells Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.”
Especially pertinent for our discussion today, the evangelist makes a point of telling us that Nicodemus comes to Jesus “at night.” Light and darkness have been a central theme of his writing from the first chapter of his gospel when he tells us in his opening verses that “What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
So, for him to tell us here that Nicodemus came to Jesus in the night implies that the Pharisee, however sincere his motives, is still in the dark about Jesus. He can’t see clearly and he apparently wants no one else to know that he is making this overture to Jesus, using the darkness to hide his actions, typical of someone who doesn’t want to get caught in a misdeed.
Volumes have been written about Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Martin Luther rightly maintained that it was the gospel in miniature. Arguably, it is the fulcrum of John’s gospel, his central thesis and emphasis.
And while there is every reason to spend more time on that beautiful and powerful truth, all of us eager to hear how much God loves us, it may benefit us to hear what follows, a statement of equal power, but one that few people care to hear. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “This is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.”
In my mind, the two truths are in tandem, intentionally connected by Jesus and therefore best understood if kept together. What is fascinating to me is how it presents to us two different objects of love. Jesus first says, “God so loved the world,” and then he states that “people loved the darkness.” Often, this parallelism is overlooked because the word for love in the second instance is translated as “prefers,” but, in fact, the word is more rightly translated as love.
So, on one hand, God who is light loves the world, so much so that he wants to save it, but the people of the world love darkness, not light, so much so that their works are evil, a contrast that is so stark that it is stunning. The consequences are clear. God’s love is directed towards us, while our love is directed towards evil. John apparently sees no gray area. In short, the divine heart is full of light and the heart of humanity is full of darkness.
Jesus, like Marlow in Conrad’s book, has come to the same conclusion. Humanity has a heart of darkness. And it is dark because of our love for dark deeds. It is a searing assessment of humanity, or as John says, this is the verdict on the whole lot of us. It is not that we are irredeemable; God makes one final attempt to save us by sending his Beloved Son into the world so that we can see by his light the right way to live. It is that we don’t want to be redeemed, loving darkness and hating light, proven once and for all in the crucifixion of the Beloved Son on the cross.
This selection from scripture, in many ways, is perfect for this Fourth Sunday of Lent, as the days move steadily towards the shouts of the people “Crucify him! Crucify him,” only to be followed by the heavy steps of Jesus as he staggers towards Golgotha, the weight of the beam of wood bearing down on his back, stripped naked while soldiers toss the dice to see who walks away with the shirt off his back. Looking at his body nailed to the cross informs us that we have gone as deep into the darkness of the human heart as is possible.
John’s brutal, yet truthful, judgment of humanity should strip us bare of our sanctimony and our high estimation of ourselves. He lays it out for us in the clearest terms. We have a predilection for no good, a love for darkness, as he says, that grows ever stronger because of our unwillingness to see or to walk in the light that the Beloved Son showed us. Given a choice, we go to the dark side, our resistance minimal, our attraction maximal.
What are we to do? That is the real question. The answer seems to be that somehow, sometime we are going to have to let the love of God enter our dark hearts, his light sending into the nether world the vampires that feed on the darkness that fill our hearts. If we don’t, horror awaits us as the world becomes a much darker and deadlier place than it already is. Unfortunately, it is apparent that we are incapable of doing it on our own, requiring the strength of God’s grace to pry loose from our tight fists our love for everything evil.
And that encompasses all the many things we love so ardently, such as our willful ignorance, our intentional blindness, our habitual laziness. Like the prodigal son, we have to return to the Father because he is our last hope for staying alive, begging him to take us back into his arms, and forgiving us for loving everything else more than we have loved him.
After all, this season of Lent is supposed to be the time when we finally allow a flicker of light into the dark recesses of our hearts, exposing our insatiable appetite for evil, offering us a pathway towards transformation, inviting us to become something that is finally human, somebody that brings even the least bit of light into the world.
Interestingly, Conrad intimates much the same thing early in his novel when he has Marlow say, “We live in the flicker–may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling.” By the end of the novel, it is safe to say that his earlier statement has become a prayer–Good Lord, may the flicker last as long as the old earth keeps rolling. That flicker, John reminds us, stays in the world to show us we do not have to love the darkness.
–Jeremy Myers
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