Well, friends; we have made it! For those of you who’ve been following along with our Lenten reading project, Backyard Pilgrim, we have finally reached the last week of the book. The week where we are no longer asking the questions “where is God?” or “where are you?” but hearing Jesus’ declaration: “Here I AM…for you.”
And today, his statement is: “For you, Here I AM…facing the darkness.”
Matt, the author, encourages us today to look at this passage from the end of Luke chapter 22, when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane.
“Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple police, and the elders who had come for him, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs as if I were a bandit? When I was with you day after day in the temple, you did not lay hands on me. But this is your hour, and the power of darkness!'”
Matt points out that Jesus, unlike us, does not seek to explain why there is evil. Instead, he acknowledges it, and then enters “into sin, suffering, and death to conquer them on our behalf.”
“Jesus puts the emphasis,” he writes, “not upon explaining evil, but defeating it.”
These words of Jesus also put to mind the words of Genesis 1, when “darkness covered the face of the deep.”
That darkness is back – perhaps it never really went away – but the Creator God who first spoke words of light over that primeval chaos is still here, still speaking, still creating. And still able to call forth light out of darkness and life even out of death.
This is something we will be called to remember again and again this week, as we journey deeper into the darkness with Christ. Not that we need the excuse of a Holy Week to do so; as I was reminded this morning, reading details of war atrocities perpetrated by Russian troops in Ukraine, there is no shortage of darkness in our world.
Like Christ, let us acknowledge it head on.
Let us not seek to explain it away or rationalize it, as is often our tendency.
But let us also remember that the darkness we see here has already, and ultimately, been defeated. So that as we work against it, we do so knowing that we will ultimately be victorious.
That God will once again speak over our darkness: “let there be light.”
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
-Pastor Jen
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