Sunrise
My father is an art teacher and when my sister and I were kids he used to give us lessons in art. I can still remember the things he taught us. One of the things that has stuck with me was his description of black: “Black is not a color, it is the absence of light.”
On Thursday night we had a service of Tenebrae, a traditional service during which the Passion is read and a series of candles is extinguished. By the end of the passion, all the candles have been extinguished and the gospel is read in near darkness. There’s an interesting thing that happens when the light gets low. The colors tend to blur together, detail gets lost. Blues are indistinguishable from greens; reds from greens and browns. Depth perception is lost. The view that we have of the world without light is bleak.
We gather here at sunrise on the first day of the week to observe the rising of the Son, and with him the increase in light in our world. Light that helps us to make sense of our world. Prior to Jesus’ resurrection, it is as if we had been dwelling in twilight. Living in a reality that we could not discern. But with Christ’s resurrection suddenly the dusk gives way to dawn and the brightness of day.
We who are Christians live in a radically transformed reality, a reality impacted by Jesus’ resurrection. We have been blessed with the proclamation of light in an all too dark world.
And with that light we see that we inhabit not a cold impersonal world of forces beyond our ability to cope, but a world in which God is taking an active role. A world not of hopelessness, but of hope. A world not of death, but of life, and life eternal.
