Psalm 98, Hebrews 1: 1 – 4, John 1: 1 – 14
“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Chic, scented, nicely gift boxed, and surprisingly expensive as I discovered when doing my Christmas shopping this year. A candle is perhaps the ideal present for someone who has everything. They are even consumable. No long term clutter problem there.
But it’s perhaps surprising when we have so many more efficient sources of light, that candles are still so important to us in the 21st century. A birthday cake really has to have candles. A dinner is more special with candles. We light candles when we have a service here in church; many people come in during the week to say a prayer, and they often light a candle to symbolise their prayer. Think too of the pictures we saw in November – candles placed with the flowers commemorating those who died in the terrorist attacks in Paris. And if you are old enough you may remember the vigils of prayer with candles which preceded the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. As one commentator puts it “Prayers and candles, however, filled the protesters with both peace and courage, courage that the regime’s efforts could not extinguish in the months leading up to the DDR’s collapse.” And then there was Elton John’s adapted song about Marilyn Monroe which he sang at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 “And it seemed to me that you lived your life Like a candle in the wind.”
The flickering light and the warmth of a candle can express many things – among them celebration, intimacy, prayer, outrage, protest and vulnerability. All of them are perhaps heightened because the light of a candle makes us more aware of the darkness around.
Green plants can’t manage without light, and neither can we humans. Unlike some other species we can’t see well in the dark, so we tend not to feel safe at night. It’s a very natural thing that most children and some adults are afraid of the dark. The first book of the Bible, Genesis, begins by imagining how the world began. To begin with there’s a kind of primordial soup – chaos and darkness. The first thing God does is to create light and separate the light from the darkness.
“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Much later, John takes up the theme, deliberately reflecting Genesis, and uses light as an image for Jesus Christ. Jesus was present with God the Father, he asserts, when the world was made. Now Jesus comes into the world as vulnerable as a candle flame. As a baby, completely helpless and dependent on his parents. Humankind are so easily snuffed out. And Jesus comes to shares our frailty.
I’d like to pause at this point and read you a poem by R S Thomas, which imagines a discussion in heaven between God the Father and Jesus. You have to imagine the sort of view of the earth that Tim Peake will be getting from the space station just now:
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
So, the poet says. God sees our suffering and Jesus, of his own free will offers to come to us.
I wonder if you’ve noticed the strange grammar in this sentence “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” Jesus has come to us. He is the light. The light shines out for ever because despite being put to death, Jesus has not been snuffed out. When Jesus was put to death on the Cross, He didn’t stay dead. He rose again from the dead and is alive for ever. The darkness did not overcome, because God cannot be extinguished. The human race, with our almost limitless capacity for destruction, cannot destroy God. God has come to be with us, and He will never leave us. This is the good news we celebrate at Christmas.
So, here we are, in the middle of one of the longest nights of the year, proclaiming that the light has come. War, terrorism and natural disasters both here and abroad may make us feel that the world is a very dark place indeed. We may be aware of our own darkness too; the ways in which we fail others and ourselves. If so, we can take heart from the words of one of our greatest spiritual writers: “It is not what you are, nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.” If we try to pray, our faith and our prayer may seem as momentary and fragile as a candle flame. But take heart. It is enough to want to believe, to want to pray. That is a beginning. God will take care of the rest.
“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
Amen
Draft 21 December 2015
Diana Young
[1] Cloud of Unknowing, ed Walsh, Paulist Press, p.265