The first few articles in this advent series have focused on the state of our world: created in beauty, rhythm, symmetry, and order by a good and loving God. Man is made in God's image, male and female; tasked with reproducing the image and exercising dominion over God's creation. This edenic world stands in sharp contrast to the world we see around us. The imago dei that fallen man still bears enables us to make great strides in technology, but the technology we design mostly enables us to lie, steal, and kill more efficiently and create more and faster means to receive the news telling the latest manifestation of man's rebellion.
Advent is a time for acknowledging that darkness has entered a world that God created for light and recognizing the ways this darkness manifests itself in and around us. Doing so causes us to realize how desperately we need the light restored. The lighting of a simple candle in a darkened room is a way of remembering. It's dark. We need light. We need the kind of light that reveals everything as it truly is and dispels the evil that currently inhabits God's good world. We need light that no longer suffers the oppression, injustice, hate, murder, abuse, sickness, poverty, and death that currently lurk in the darkness of our world.
St. John's telling of the Gospel opens with a unique perspective of the advent of Jesus Christ. Rooting the coming of Christ in Old Testament prophecy, he tells of John the Baptist's proclamation of the imminent appearance of the Messiah. This is how he describes it:
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God - children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, "This is the one I spoke about when I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.'") Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
John 1:6-18I started writing this article on the evening of Monday, 10 December. I got caught up preparing to preach on Waiting with Joy and didn't sit down to finish the article until last week. Since that date, shooters have terrorized a shopping mall in Oregon and devastated a small town in Connecticut. Mankind's capacity for evil seems to know no limit. Certainly the evil one's appetite for cruelty knows no boundaries. If we are ever to know life the way it should be, the way God intended it, we must have a Messiah - one who can break sin's hold and overpower the evil will that devastates our world. We don't know how to fix things on our own. We desperately need a Savior. We need a power greater than us who can set us free and show us what shalom looks like. Light that can dispel the darkness.
The law that shows us what's wrong with the world and why came from God through Moses. Grace, the Divine ability to do what is otherwise impossible, and truth, the revelation of the true character of God lived in the image-bearer, came through Jesus Christ. Light has come, the very light we desperately needed. Life can be good again. Will it be? When?
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