A little light, please
The texts for Christmas Day: Isaiah 52:7–10, Psalm 98, Hebrews 1:1–12, and John 1:1–14
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did/does not overcome it.” – John 1:5
It’s amazing how even with the smallest amount of light, your eyes will adjust so that you can see. I’ve been on a couple of cave tours and generally when you are deep within the cave, the tour guide turns off the lights and then talks for a while. In the depths of the cave, there is no light. None at all. Even after a really long time, your eyes can’t adjust. There is nothing but darkness. No perception of anything at all. And, while your other senses start to pick up, so that you hear better and your sense of touch becomes more sensitive, it is really disorienting. The amazing thing is, that even if you spent hours, days, without light in the cave, your eyes would never adjust. I imagine that it would be pretty difficult to figure out how to get back out of the cave if there was no light.
But, you know, in that situation all you’d need is a really tiny bit of light. The light from a light up watch, the light from a candle, the light from a cell phone—tiny bits of light—positively light up the space. And by those lights, it would be easy to navigate in the dark. It is interesting that all of that darkness is overcome with such a little tiny bit of light. It is amazing that all of that darkness doesn’t somehow swallow up such a tiny bit of light.
I think there is an amazing amount of darkness in this world. There is suffering and brokenness. There is violence and death. There is hatred and deep sorrow. There is so, so much injustice and cruelty. But, amazingly enough, this darkness does not overcome the light. Amazingly enough, even when this darkness tried to destroy the light sent into the world—God’s light of love and peace and hope and justice embodied in Jesus—the light was not overcome. This seemingly fragile bit of light, a candle in a vast cave of dark, destroyed the darkness and was raised from the dead. And, amazingly enough, it is by this little bit of light that we navigate through our lives: shining God’s love—small though it sometimes seems—in the corners and crevices so that darkness may be overcome forever.
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Jabbok Dawn 