Please read the passage before the homily.
My sisters and brothers,
The blind see no light. Criminals prefer to work at night, without light. Today is the new moon, when the moon does not show her face. The Elect ones, chosen for baptism, look for the light of the world and Jesus and in his Church.
God sent his son into the world, not condemn the world to darkness but to save the world by the radiance of his son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light. Whoever lives the truth comes to the light so that his works may be seen as done in God.
Once, in the desert the people were afflicted by a rash of snake bites. Moses made a model snake, put it on a pole and told the Israelites to look at the pole and be cured. The cause of their disaster became to the cause of their cure.
One cause of our sinfulness is that we battle light against darkness and body against spirit. In Jesus, the Son of God, God has embraced darkness and light, night and day. In Jesus we can learn how to unite the opposites we experience into harmony. We are creatures of body and spirit and by nature we crave the union of the opposites. In accepting the opposites into our life, we can become mature and more united in ourselves.
John says that people preferred the darkness to the light. Prefer means to want something more than the other. What if, when the light came into the world, the people accepted the light as an equal part of life with the darkness?
The people looked at the snake, accepted that snakes exist, and found themselves cured. We look at Christ crucified. We accept his death, but we also accept his resurrection. Death and life, light and darkness, body and spirit are part of our lives. When we accept them, we grow.
When we admit our faults and virtues, we have a true and valid picture of ourselves. The light can embrace our darkness, but without the light, darkness triumphs; we need the light and the darkness. It is the radiance of Christ who embraced our human darkness who unites in us our darkness and his light. By this we are saved.