A Great Light Has Dawned
Edward Hopper: Morning In Cape Cod
Early each morning I find myself watching out my study window for the sun to rise. There is a time of waiting, a time of expectation, a threshold time. I often grow quiet, a bit reverent. I have come to consider this event, so common as to be overlooked, a breathtaking announcement of new beginnings, a new start, a daily hint that new life is possible. We have gone to bed in darkness—perhaps even darkness in our souls, gripped by anxiety, surely with worries about our world, or fear, or grief for so many of our friends who suffer loss—but then the sun rises. Again. Can it be? New life is possible!
Could the sun be rising over our troubled world? I’ve been thinking a lot about that these days. It feels like just maybe the clouds under which we have lived are lifting, or at least our attitudes about those clouds are shifting. Maybe we are beginning to realize the fear under which we cower is in part our own making. I have a feeling people have reached their limits, reaching deeper down to locate what life is really all about. I may be projecting, perhaps naïve, but I think something new is coming, like the sun rising out of darkness.
I’ve always loved Van Gogh’s profound fascination with the rising sun. Especially in the last years of his life, Van Gogh wrestled with demons of deep internal darkness. These extraordinary paintings, blazing out with the brightness of a new sun, came as the great painter stared out the windows of his asylum in Arles, France. Troubled in mind and soul he watched the sun come up. Then he painted, over and over. Writers and painters throughout the ages remind us how much we crave the light of the rising sun.
The Scriptures constantly remind us to wait for the light to come again. They are never shy about darkness, willing always, to portray, often vividly, the circumstances of poverty, oppression, violence, illness, always the darkness of the soul. So often they capture moments of hopelessness, emptiness, loneliness. But darkness never, ever, gets the last word. Wait for the sun to rise again, they tell us in so many ways. Wait for new light to spread across the world and into our hearts.
In this Advent season I have been struck anew that Jesus comes as the promise of new light. Our world is swamped in darkness. How desperately we need the light: Come, Lord Jesus, come. We hear the singing, we know the yearning. This is my new prayer for this time in my life and this time in our world: Come, Lord Jesus, come. Morning and night, in the coming year, I will sing it. Come like the blazing sun, come as you are, Jesus, the light of the world. This very light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it.
We listen in this season as the Prophet Isaiah tells the story of a desperate people caught up in the awful flow of suffering in Babylonian exile. Would they ever return to normal?
Whether they turn their gaze upwards or look down,
everywhere is distress and darkness inescapable,
constraint and gloom that cannot be avoided.
It seems easy to imagine the great prophet is telling the story of our day as well, caught up, as we seem to be, in distress and fear and gloom, stumbling about in inescapable darkness.
But something dramatic bursts out of the darkness, something like the rising sun, something like a new light we’ve never seen before:
The people that walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those who lived in a land as dark as death
a light has dawned.For a child has been born to us. . . .
Will we be a people who remain mired in a land as dark as death? Is it possible we might be a people who live as if a great light has dawned? Let us sing then: Come, Lord Jesus, come.
For the world long ago, for us in our own dark time, a child is born, a light has dawned, we have seen a great light. And so, as I sit waiting and watching for the sun to rise each morning, I will sing my new prayer: Come, Lord Jesus, come. May I know afresh, really know, that a great light has already dawned. Something new is possible!