“The night is far spent”
There are degrees of darkness. There is the literal darkness of the night in the twilight of the year. There is the metaphorical darkness of civilisations and cultures in their decay and disarray. There is the social and economic darkness of communities and families in their distress and dismay. There is the darkness of institutions when they betray their foundational and governing principles. There is the darkness of souls in psychological confusion – distraught, anxious, angry and fearful. There is the darkness of the fear of death. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness.
In one way or another, these darknesses are all forms of spiritual darkness. They all belong to the darkness of sin and doubt, the darkness of death and dying, the darkness of despair. The darkness of despair is the deepest darkness, the darkness of the “far spent night” of the soul, the darkness of darkness itself, as it were. Why? Because it is the darkness of denial. Despair is the denial of desire. It signals the rejection of the possibilities of light, of faith; the rejection of the possibilities of hope, of what is looked for; and the rejection of the possibilities of love, of what is embraced in the knowing delight of what is good and true, of what is holy and beautiful.
In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero, Gilgamesh, is changed in his soul and outward aspect by the loss of his friend, Enkidu. He sets out on a search for everlasting life; it is really a quest for wisdom, for he knows, and we know, that is his destiny is not everlasting life but kingship. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limits of our knowing.
He undertakes the first of the great spiritual and literary journeys of our humanity, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found, the quest for wisdom and meaning. He journeys to find Utnapishtim to ask him “concerning life and death.” Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the much older story of the flood contained in The Epic of Gilgamesh. He has been granted everlasting life and has survived the flood, the flood which was intended to wipe out the human nuisance, for that is all we are, annoyance and a nuisance to the gods in the Sumerian world, a view shared, it seems, by the more rabid and extreme environmentalists in our day. Yet the flood threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” against the walls of the city of Uruk. But where is Utnapishtim? At the end of the world and beyond the end of the world, we might say, all alone except for his wife, unnamed and unknown. We may ask what kind of immortality is this is, virtually alone at the end of the world; no community, no humanity.
“There is no permanence,” Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh. “The grass withereth and the flower fadeth,” Isaiah tells us in the pageant of the Advent season. What remains? What is there to look for? The ancient wisdom of Ecclesiastes is perfectly clear; there is nothing “new under the sun.” And everything under the sun is vanity. “Vanity of vanities”, saith the preacher, “a vexation of the spirit,” says the King James Version, “a striving after wind” is the more literal translation. There can be no greater vexation of the spirit than the pursuit of a useless and impossible quest.
Gilgamesh has heard Utnapishtim but he has yet to be convinced. He has been told about his mortality and he has contemplated his mortality in the death of his friend, Enkidu. But he has sought out the only mortal/immortal, Utnapishtim, who invites him to the test of his mortality and, ultimately, of his humanity. It is a wonderful test. “Only prevail against sleep for six days and seven nights.” How wonderfully adolescent! But how to prove that he has or has not slept during the period of six days and seven nights? “Ah, ah! Caught you!” “No. I just closed my eyes. I wasn’t really asleep!” we might protest. Assertion and counter-assertion. How do you prove to someone that they fell asleep? The loaves’ test. Utnapishtim’s wife bakes loaves of bread, one for every day. Gilgamesh confronts the evidence of his having fallen asleep, the evidence of his reason, too, we might say, in the sequence of the loaves in their decay. He convicts himself by what his eyes see.
At this point, Gilgamesh says to Utnapishtim, “already the thief in the night has hold of my limbs, death inhabits my room; wherever my foot rests, there I find death.” A marvelous moment. Death comes like a “thief in the night” yet already we anticipate his coming through the contemplation of the death of others. Gilgamesh confronts the limits of our humanity. Death as “a thief in the night” becomes a commonplace phrase and image that has haunted the literary and theological imagination ever since.
Paul in his Letter to the Thessalonians, says something more and something quite different about that night thief, death. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” Not death simply, but “the day of the Lord.” It makes all the difference in the world. Death has been gathered already into the coming of the Lord! Such is Advent. Darkness and light. The challenge is to think it and make the understanding our own. Otherwise we are in the dark even when we think we see.
Sherlock Holmes and his loyal companion, Dr. Watson, were on a camping trip. In the middle of the night, Holmes wakes up and gives Watson a nudge.
“Watson,” he says, “look up in the sky and tell me what you see.”
“I see millions of stars, Holmes,” says Watson.
“And what do you conclude from that, Watson?” Watson thinks for a moment and says, “Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I see that God is all-powerful, and we are small and insignificant. Uh, what does it tell you, Holmes?”
“Watson, you idiot! Someone has stolen our tent!”
That’s what happens when we aren’t paying full attention. Advent would awaken us. Wachet auf! It belongs to the Church to proclaim the hope of the coming of the light of grace and salvation. Advent begins in the quiet darkness of the year. But Advent looks to the coming of the light. It is the season of revelation – to our knowing in faith what God reveals to us. It is the season of hope – to our looking to God in holy expectation. It is the season of love – to our embrace of God’s love coming towards us.
In the great gospel for this day, Christ comes to Jerusalem. He enters the city triumphantly. It is a royal procession. The King has come to his own city. All is light and grace and glory, it seems. “Hosanna to the Son of David; Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest,” the multitudes cry, both those who went before and those that followed, them and us. “Who is this?” the whole city was moved to say with wonder and in perplexity. We know the story. “He came unto his own and his own received him not,” as we shall hear at Christmas. The King, God’s own Word and Son, will be rejected. All that is light and life ends in darkness and death, it seems; the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the darkness of the cross and the grave.
Yet, this will be the real triumph, the entry of the King into the things of his own. He will reign from the tree. Through the darkness of our sin and death, through the darkness of our rejection and denial of him, through the darkness of the “far spent night,” the darkness of our despair named in him –“my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” – comes the greater light of salvation.
Advent not only reminds us of his coming but deepens our understanding of the meaning of his coming. His coming names our darkness in the greater light of his love. Advent calls us to look again towards him who comes knowing our darkness, the darkness of our refusal and rejection of him.
He has embraced our darkness in his love. He has made a path of light for us through the darkness, even the darkness of the “far spent night.” He comes that we might know and receive him even through the darkness of our refusals to receive him. He comes “unto his own” in the greater power of his light and grace, making a way to him even through the patterns of our sin-twisted lives. His coming calls us to repentance; this is the royal way of Advent.
“The night is far spent,” to be sure, but “the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness” and “let us put on the armour of light.” The light of Christ awaits us. He comes as a thief in the far-spent night of all our darknesses but he comes to redeem and sanctify. We can only look for his coming, in faith, in hope and in love; the counter to our emptiness and despair, the counter to the culture of nihilism. Embrace the Advent light of his love.
“The night is far spent”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2013