Light the Night
This whole getting dark at 4:30 in the afternoon is driving me crazy. It’s so dark - and for so long too! Why, oh why do we have this clock-changing nonsense? Does it make Winter shorter? No. It’s all cold and dark all the time. After all, the only thing I like about Winter is that it ends.
So yes, Florida does have a certain appeal to me. But it still gets dark way too early. That said...
It’s been darker.
The Bible speaks of the Messiah’s arrival as a moment when people that were entrenched in darkness suddenly saw a great light. The ancient world was dark. Very dark. And that was without changing any clocks.
In the first century, the world population was 231 million people, give or take a couple million; 57 million of those people were in China, according to the Han dynasty census. Some scholars put the global population at between 110-150 million.
Only 75% of babies lived past the first year, and 50% of the surviving children died before age 10. Whether a baby was kept was determined by the father, and ‘exposure’ - the practice of abandoning unwanted babies (especially girls) on trash dumps outside city walls - was common.
It was dark!
The average life expectancy in Rome was 21.
It was dark.
Slavery was widespread across many cultures.
It was dark.
When it comes to the Jewish people of Judea, they were subjugated to Antiochus, one of the successors to Alexander the Great, in175 BC. He invaded their land, killed thousands, banned the Hebrew language, the study of Scripture, and circumcision. He desecrated the Temple and altars by sacrificing pigs on them and then setting up a statue of Zeus in it, sacking the complex and carting off all the sacred vessels.
Antiochus called himself “Epiphanes” - God manifest; the Jews referred to him as “Epimames,” the Madman.
It was dark.
Under the Maccabeans, the Jews staged a revolt, winning a certain degree of independence for a brief season. Their surprising victory led to the Feast of Hannukah - finally, some light! It was rather short-lived, however. The Romans showed up before long, together with their capacity to slaughter. On one occasion, they ran out of crosses on which to hang their victims in Jerusalem.
It was dark.
A well-known hymn describes that period of history this way: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining…”
“Pining” comes from a Latin word for pain. To pine is not simply to ‘miss’ but to be in a place of painful brokenness longing for deliverance; to be in the middle of a long night of suffering and weeping with anguished longing for the dawn and deliverance to come. It was a time when life appeared not just brief but cheap, and cruel. The entire world could be summed up with Saul Bellow’s famous observation that, “Death waits like a concrete floor waits for a falling lightbulb.”
Did I mention that it was dark?
Yet even in that darkness, something even more powerful was quietly waiting and growing. It was hope. It wasn’t the kind of hope that wasn’t sure about an outcome, but the kind of hope kept alive in a heart and culture because it was rooted in the character of the Creator. It was a sure and certain kind of hope.
Late in the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, on the outskirts of his vast Empire, to people employed in first-century dirty jobs, the long-held Jewish hope began to be fulfilled.
Unto us a child is born... the kingdom is upon his shoulders… peace will come and increase…
God is doing this!
That’s what Isaiah had said would occur. And now, after all of those centuries, it was happening. “The light comes into the world, and the darkness could not stop it.” That’s how John described the birth of the Savior. Magi found him by following a light in the night - a star in the Eastern sky. Shepherds found him because while laboring on the night shift, angelic Light lit up the darkness and told them what was happening a short walk away in their hometown.
O Holy Night
The hymn I noted earlier is “O Holy Night,” and it was written in France in 1847. It notes the darkness that still prevails in so many ways: “chains shall he break for the slave is our brother…” reads stanza two. I’m guessing this hymn wasn’t all that popular in certain American circles in the 1800s - and even into the 20th century. But the hymn is very clear about something. It isn’t just the visible, political, and cultural aspects of the darkness that must be faced. No, the darkness runs deeper. Long lay the world in SIN and ERROR pining… till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
We moderns don’t like that word ‘sin’ very much. We’d prefer to say, “God be merciful to me, a miscalculator.”
What is Sin?
Well, first of all, it’s a power deep within us, a part of our very nature which, right from the start, seduces us and reduces us. Then, sin is a failure to reach a standard that’s been set. It’s trespassing a boundary clearly marking out a place we don’t belong. It’s the darkness within. It’s who we are in our brokenness and hate; it’s what we’ve failed to do when we were called to do it; it’s what we’ve done when we know that it was forbidden. It’s the pervasive darkness that roils like the sea, agitated and angry, envious and lustful, unsatisfied and lashing out, pitying self when not promoting self. Buechner wrote, “Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within, and if ever we are to find true shelter, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and need for true shelter that we have to start.”
It is dark in here.
Jesus knew that as great as was the darkness in the culture, the real source of the darkness was the heart of humankind. He went there. “It isn’t what goes into your mouth and stomach that defiles you,” Jesus said. “It’s what comes out of your heat, into your attitudes, and out of your mouth in words.”
God sees these sinful places in our lives. Yet rather than casting us aside, he employees these to get our attention. “There is a crack in everything,” said Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.” Indeed. It was night at creation. But God said, “Let there be light!” It was night for thousands of years… then one night… something very strange occurred. There were shepherds on a hillside and angels and a baby’s cry… and... “The people who sat in darkness saw a great light… “
What they experienced we’ve come to describe as wonder and “a thrill of hope.”
There is a Night around us in many ways and Advent is an invitation to consider it… within and around us. It is also an invitation to the thrill of hope, to know that God does not leave the darkness unattended to. He will deal with it. After all, God is Light and in Him, there is no darkness at all!
Advent is marked by hopeful longing, by certain assurances growing within us despite the sorrows and suffering around us. Advent says:
- You have a Savior - Christ is the Light of the World
- You have a Mission - Christ also said that YOU are the Light of the World. U2’s Bono said, “I’m a musician. I write songs. I just hope when the day is done I’ve been able to tear a little corner off of the darkness.”
- You have a Hope - The Savior who came is the One who will come again.
Lo! He comes, with clouds descending,
once for our salvation slain;
thousand thousand saints attending
swell the triumph of His train.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
God appears on earth to reign.
For now, “we keep waiting, waiting for the world to change”, as John Mayer reminds us. But the change has to begin in us and with us, with the Light of the Gospel transforming the night of sin in our own hearts, eradicating the darkness of hate, indifference, and doubt.
The Light has come and soon “there will be no more night” (Revelation 22:5).