2 Kings 18: The Darkness is Real

After watching town after town fall to the Assyrians, Jerusalem is under siege. The Assyrian king sends what can best be described as a minister of propaganda, to speak to the people--in their own native tongue--about how it's over, and God will not deliver them. Time to give up hope. Nobody is coming to their rescue. 

I can't read this today and not think of Aleppo. How no one is coming to their rescue. How the horrific suffering of so many innocent people now seems impossible to avoid. How people of good conscience are watching this long night of suffering, wishing we could offer something more than our prayers, and finding precious little. Maybe there was some way America could have intervened, that would have done more good than harm. Maybe not. But for most ordinary people, the horrifying reality is that the best we can do is not turn away, but wait and watch through this long, dark night. 

We are entering a season of light. For thousands of years, ancient cultures celebrated the winter solstice (tomorrow night), though it is the longest, darkest night of the year, because on that night, the tide turns, and the light slowly comes back. After tomorrow, the days will get longer again. Symbolically, it's understandable that Christians in the Northern Hemisphere chose this time to also celebrate the coming of the Light of the World: Jesus. 

While it is true that darkness isn't actually a "thing"--it's simply the absence of light--it is a very palpable thing in the lives of many people. We know it is only as real as our experience of it; as real as we make it. And yet anyone who has spent time there knows that can be very real indeed. There are some nights when the miracle of Christmas--"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light"--is something we can speak with our mouths, and understand in our heads, but not necessarily feel with our hearts. Some nights are just long, and dark, and the help you pictured just isn't forthcoming. But no dark night is endless. No winter lasts forever.

Christian hope is not founded in the idea that everything is okay because Jesus was born. In fact, Christian hope allows us the profound freedom to admit how deeply not okay things really are. If we were alone in the dark, we would have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that it really isn't that dark, after all, and we're really okay, you're fine, I'm fine, Syria's fine, everything's fine, because it has to be. Reality would be too hard to face alone. But because we are not alone here, because the Word has been made flesh in this dark world, we have one who will sit with us and allow us some deep moments of not being okay, and the faint glimmer of some sense that one day, it will be.

Christ, dwell with us in our darkness. Help us to call it what it is, and hand it over to you, to make it what it will be. Amen.