Everlasting Light: Encountering God in the darkness

Ivan Radford reflects on 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and the promise of God’s everlasting light.

As Advent begins, and we prepare for the brightness of Christmas, it can feel like a gloomy time. Wars and a climate crisis are impacting lives across the globe. People you love may no longer be with you. There are things to organise and bills to pay – you might not be able to afford to switch on your Christmas lights this year. You might be feeling isolated or cut-off from your community. Advent gives us time to acknowledge the darkness – and encounter God within it.

‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ (SASB 118), written in 1868, reminds us that the world has always been a dark place. Today, the streets of Bethlehem haven’t lain still for a long time – riven with conflict, they give a chilling new meaning to the phrase ‘deep and dreamless sleep’. And yet above all this, over all this, there is still the knowledge that the ‘silent stars’ go by. As the second verse puts it, even while mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.

Even in the darkness, God is here. God has been here since the start. God was here before God switched the lights on. The Message paraphrase of Genesis 1 contains these gorgeous words: ‘First this: God created the Heavens and Earth – all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness’ (vv1 and 2).

It can be easy for our lives to feel like that inky blackness, to be weighed down into a bottomless emptiness by the state of the world, the challenges in our communities, the worries we have for our loved ones. We can be lulled into a mindset where we dare not dream, where we forget that we do not walk in the dark valleys alone (see Psalm 23:4).

‘Yet in thy dark streets shineth/ The everlasting light,’ declares Phillips Brooks’s timeless carol. The darkness we face isn’t something to keep from God. It is only through meeting with God that we can overcome it. As the first verse poetically sums up: ‘The hopes and fears of all the years/ Are met in thee tonight.’ We don’t go into Christmas without our fears; we bring them to God, who walks with us through them.

‘How silently/ The wondrous gift is given!’ marvels the third verse. Amid the gloom, the carol reminds us we must actively seek out the quiet miracle of God’s gift of Jesus. It can only be received by ‘meek souls’, who remember that we have all walked in darkness at some point, that only through God’s grace can we leave the darkness behind us – the things we regret, the mistakes we have made.

Many in this world are still walking in darkness. Just as ‘we hear the Christmas angels/ The great glad tidings tell’, we are called to share God’s illuminating, life-transforming light with others.

It is a light that brings hope – and the promise of God’s presence – not in spite of the darkness but in the thick of it.

Those words from Genesis are echoed by John, who writes that ‘nothing – not one thing! – came into being without him’ (1:3 MSG). John reassures us that ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ (1:5). Because God was there before all things, because God has always been at work reconciling all things to God (see Colossians 1:20), because God will be there beyond all things, we can be certain that the darkness can never overcome God’s light.

The light is above and over the darkness. It shines a way on our path (see Psalm 119:105). As we reflect it to others, we together live in a light that is immeasurably brighter than we can comprehend (see Ephesians 3:20). It is beyond the constraints and problems of this world, beyond time. It is an enduring, everlasting light.

This Advent, whatever darkness you are currently facing, take time to look for God’s light. It is a light that never goes out. Carry it with you into Christmas and the year ahead.