“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 civilizations 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. The “far spent night” is the hour of deepest darkness. There is the darkness of the fear of death.
In one way or another, they 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, of what is true and good.
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 and mortality. He is mortal and has to come to terms with his mortality. Wisdom is found in the embrace of the limitations of our knowing.
He undertakes the first of the great spiritual journeys of our humanity in terms of literature, which, of course, is where all the great journeys are to be found. 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 and yet threatened the gods, too. They “cowered like curs” beside the wall 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 this is.
“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 tradition. There can be no greater vexation of the spirit than the pursuit of a useless and impossible quest. Who can catch the wind?
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, 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!” Assertion and counter-assertion. How to prove to the one who contests? The loaf test. Utnapishtim’s wife bakes loaves, one for every day. Gilgamesh will be confronted with 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 is convicted 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 and yet we anticipate his coming through the contemplation of the death of others. Death comes like a thief in the night, stealing in upon us. Gilgamesh confronts the limits of our humanity .
But Paul in his Letter to the Thessalonians is saying something more and something quite different. “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! And such is Advent. The darkness and the light. The challenge is to think it and so make the understanding our own.
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 Advent gospel, 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 that went before, and that followed cry, both those who went before, them, and those that followed, us. But is it not that “he came unto his own and his own received him not” as Christmas reminds us? “Who is this?” the whole city is moved to say with wonder and in perplexity. We know the story. 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.
And 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” – will come the greater light of salvation.
Advent not only reminds us of his coming but deepens our understanding of its meaning. It intends that we might come to know more fully and more truly the one who has come to us. His coming names our darkness in the greater light of his love. Advent is our wake-up call. It means 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 of 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 night but he comes to redeem and sanctify. We can only look for his coming, in faith, in hope, and in love. It is the counter to our emptiness and despair; the counter to the culture of nihilism, if only we will embrace the light of his love. The night is far spent but the day of the Lord is at hand.
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Advent 2018