Advent

Full Brightness

Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?

Josh Retterer / 12.22.22

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Mal 3:2)

No matter how tightly I squeeze my eyes shut, I can still see light from the sun if I turn to face it. That weird pinky-orange glowing eyelid light. Now, instead of trying to shut it out, what if we hopped in a spaceship to get as close as humanly possible to the sun. To save it. Or, the plot of the 2007 movie, Sunshine. Dr. Searle, the psych officer of the aforementioned spaceship is hurtling towards the sun. Looking at it through the viewport, he is surprised to learn he is seeing Sol at 2% of its brightness — from thirty-six million miles away!

At 4%, the ship’s computer, appropriately named ICARUS, informs Searle that the damage to his retinas would be irreversible. Accommodatingly, ICARUS suggested 3.1% for thirty seconds; he’d still be able to see afterwards. How could he resist? I love the screenplay’s description of his reaction, “SEARLE sucks in a gasp, like a man diving into ice water.” Light did that.

Malachi 3:2 asks, who can stand when he appears? The prophet asks this while pointing to the Creator of a star that we can only briefly withstand a tiny fraction of its light. I don’t think God’s looking for an answer here.

Divine sarcasm aside, this actually becomes great news for us, right after immediately becoming really bad news for us. It’s good news because Malachi points at Jesus before He was even born. That’s who can stand, the Light shining in the darkness as John 1:5 describes him. Light like a sunrise, a dawn, a new birth. There is a passage from a chapter titled, O Morning Star, in Jane Williams book, The Art of Advent, that gets at this light and good news theme.

In the Bible, light and dark are often motifs that circle around choice and judgement. In Romans 13:12, salvation is the bright day we are longing for, just over the horizon, and now is the time of the morning star; soon it will be broad daylight, and we must be ready for all our deeds to be seen. There is a mixture of hope and fear in these motifs, as we both long for and shrink from the life-giving, revelatory light. We cannot live without it, but somehow we have persuaded ourselves that our grey half-lit lives are enough.

The coming of the day is inexorable: nothing can hold it back, no one can delay it, and yet it comes so gently that it is hard to say at which precise moment the day starts and the night is definitely over. Like so many of the Advent themes, this calls us to reimagine the power of God at work in Jesus.

That power at work in Jesus was enough to defeat the darkness of death, his and ours. That part’s done, but we wait for the full brightness accompanying His return. Not quite yet … but dawn is inevitable with an already risen Savior. The miracle of it is that we will be able to see Him, face to face, with our eyes wide open.