If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.” (John 8:12) Or, in Britten’s words: If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy, Then flit not from this heavenly Boy. There’s only one way to defeat the darkness: Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. That’s a word of holiday cheer if I ever heard one: In the midst of the darkness of December and the darkness of our world, we are invited into the Light – the lux deluxe. This little babe is the eternal Light that all the powers of darkness cannot understand, cannot overwhelm, and cannot extinguish. One single ray of light frees us from the dark. Light and darkness are opposites, but they’re not opposites of equal power. And though sometimes the evidence seems to point to the contrary, this is not a battle that can end up going either way. They saw evil and darkness threaten to overwhelm the light. John wrote in the midst of persecution, Britten wrote in the midst of war. But amazingly, he is also the one whose existence makes hell itself tremble. These are powerfully contradictory images – as a little babe, Jesus is cold, and needy and helpless. Henry Schellenberg’s College Singers: This little babe so few days oldīritten takes the image of the little baby Jesus out of the Bethlehem crèche and onto the cosmic battlefield. The 20 th-century composer Benjamin Britten powerfully and poetically reminds us of this truth in his carol This Little Babe, a song I first encountered in when I was at college, singing in Dr. The Word gave life to everything that was created,Īnd the darkness can never extinguish it. Sometimes, in our cooing over the “little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay”, we forget that this baby shakes the rattle of battle, declaring war on the powers of evil and darkness. Not some hot cocoa veneer of holiday cheer, but the epic, heaven-and-earth shaking truth of the eternal Light dazzling the darkness. In the midst of very real darkness, this is the Christmas story we need. Though they seem powerful, they cannot understand, cannot overwhelm, and cannot extinguish the Light of Christ, the ‘Lux deluxe’, try as they might. John picks up on this foundational image and expands the light and darkness imagery to spotlight the spiritual war which is being waged between God and the hostile forces that seek to snuff out the light.
In Genesis, God’s first word sang out into the wild and waste, separating light from darkness. perhaps a little more star of wonder and a little less moon of doom? Some lux redux to “in thy dark streets shineth”? “Umm Kara”, you might be thinking, “maybe turn up the holiday cheer a bit. The ‘darkness’ of natural disasters, systemic racism, economic and social injustice, a global pandemic with no real end in sight – these darknesses threaten to overwhelm and defeat us. That feeling also applies to the emotional or spiritual darkness we often feel when we look around our world. Most of us who live in Canada know what it’s like to have to go out in the winter in the dark, only to come home, still dark. While I try to avoid driving alone in the dark, when the sun rises late and sets early, it’s unavoidable. Now, living in northern Manitoba, I still spend a lot of time driving on lonely highways. For many of those months, I and my fellow commuters left home in the dark and returned home in the dark. For over 20 years I drove to Providence College from Winnipeg, a 45 minute drive on a wind-swept highway.
0 kommentar(er)
