In a Different Light

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness." Henri J.M. Nouwen

"For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."  Jesus

I have read these words of Jesus hundreds of times over the years and have gained much comfort from them. It's so good to know that Jesus is not only sharing that His burden is light, but that my burden can be light as well.  The meaning is something like, "Since My burden is light and I am in you, your burden can be light." Sometimes, though, when I read scripture, I see something for the first time. Recently, when I read the passage from Matthew chapter 11 I was struck with another possibility. Maybe Jesus wasn't talking about "light" as in not very heavy but "light", that stuff that shines in the darkness.  So now when Jesus said, "My burden is light" he was saying what I carry around is no heavier than light.

Physicists have been researching the properties of light for over a hundred years. For many of those years the scientists lined up on both sides of an argument.  Some believed that light was a particle (a photon), and others believed that light was a wave.  Einstein showed in his General Theory of Relativity that light is both a particle and a wave. Light is indeed a particle, a photon, but that the flow of photons creates a wave. Years later physicists captured a snapshot of this dual behavior so that it was no longer just theory or conjecture.

As the discussion continued, physicists and astronomers wanted to know if light weighed anything and again they lined up on the side of yes or no.  Those who said it did weigh something said that light contains energy which according to Einsten's famous equation means it contains mass. Then if it contains mass it has weight.  One scientist put it this way, "If you have a box containing light and another box without light, the one without light will weigh a little less." Over the years as this discussion continued, some bright physicist said,"Well if light weighs something, it doesn't weight much."

Which gets us back to the words of Jesus.  Why even fool around with this meaning when the context of "light" is the weight of things and not the material that lights the universe?  I fool around with it because light is such an important  theme of the Bible and it is such a pervasive part of our world and our universe. Genesis 1:1, the first verse of the Bible, we read that light was the first thing God created. In the birth narrative of Jesus we are told that the shepherds and wise men followed the light of a star to find the infant king in Bethlehem. I also fool around with it because it's so enjoyable to think that Jesus said, "The heaviest thing I carry is light.  Learn to just carry light."

I do this sort of thing with a lot of Bible stories. Jesus' first miracle was to turn the water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. I've often wondered since He was not bound by our natural laws if, just for fun, he turned the wine into 1952 California cabernet sauvignon. The  steward did say it was the best wine he had ever tasted, or something like that.

So giving my theory the benefit of the doubt, today when you feel the proverbial weight of the world on your shoulders, imagine that the heaviest thing you are forced to carry is a beam of light. And walk in the knowledge that "a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness."