Children of Light (2 of 2)

The participation Chapter 15 named in seed form has reached its visible form here. Internal participation, by which the Spirit conforms the disciple to the image of the Son, was happening through the years of the disciple's life — mostly invisible from inside it, recognizable only in retrospect, registered as the slow alteration of the disciple's mass over decades into the kind of mass that resembles the Son. In the new creation that hidden operation becomes visible. The disciple is luminous because the participation is luminous. The participation is the participation in the Light who is the Son.

1 John 3:2 names the mechanism:

"Dear friends, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever it is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is." — 1 John 3:2 (NET) (NLM verification pending)

The seeing produces the likeness. The disciple seeing the Son fully and directly in the new creation is the disciple being made finally and fully like him. And the likeness is visible. The disciple takes on the appearance of the One he beholds.

The chapter has to be careful about what it is and is not claiming. The luminosity is participatory, not essential. The disciples shine as the sun, but they are not the sun. They are not little independent sources of being. They reflect and refract and share the glory that originates in the Lamb who is the Lamp. The Creator-and-creation distinction holds even in the luminous final state. The Son is the Light by nature. The disciple is luminous by participation, by adoption, by grace. The disciple shines because the disciple is in the One who is the Light.

The pastoral consequence for the disciple in the present life is concrete. The disciple does not yet shine. The disciple is tired and graying and sometimes confused and often distracted, and the body he is in is not yet the body of glory that Philippians 3:21 promises him. But the operation that will produce the shining is operating now. The internal participation that will become visible glory is already underway. The Spirit who will accomplish the transformation at the resurrection is the same Spirit who is at work in the disciple's Tuesday afternoon. The recognitions and the drifts and the returns of Chapter 12 are not unrelated to the shining of Chapter 17. They are the inner form of what the shining will be when the participation is complete.

The branch that has been receiving the sap is the branch that will bear the radiant fruit. The abiding of Chapter 11 is what produces, over the seasons of the disciple's life, the disciple of Chapter 17. The fruit-bearing has been happening invisibly all along. The visible fruit at the end is the same fruit that the abiding has been producing in seed form. The disciple who has remained in the vine through the seasons is the disciple who will, at the harvest, be revealed as the kind of branch the vine has been making him into.

And the whole spine of the volume can be seen here from the destination. Genesis 1 begins with light — let there be light, and there was light — before the sun or the moon or any secondary luminary had been made. Matthew 17 has the Son's face shining like the sun in the Transfiguration. Matthew 13:43 has the disciples shining like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. Revelation 22 has the Lamb as the Lamp of the cosmos, with the saved walking by his light and seeing his face. The narrative of light runs from creation to consummation. The Light who was there before the sun is the Light who will be there after the sun is no longer needed. The disciples, who were made in the image of the One who is the Light, will at the end be radiant with the Light they were made to bear.