Morning comes

IC XC
✙
NI KA

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Antiphon for 21 December

THE ANTIPHON FOR 21 December, the Winter Solstice, is the turning point for the antiphons – as the solstice is the turning point of the year. The preceding Antiphons have mentioned either Jewish antecedents or Gentile ones for the Messiah. This Antiphon mentions neither – or both – for it refers only to those who “dwell in darkness and the shadow of death”. That’s all humanity. We are all in this together.

The light dawns slowly. For those who are in the east, it dawns “sooner” than for those who are in the west. The quotes are there because, of course, it dawned for them just as slowly – but earlier. The light of God rose first on the Jews “on Sinai’s height” but it took them nearly 2,000 years to be ready for Messiah and even then, some missed the point. And as St Justin the Philosopher points out, God was at work in Plato and Socrates, but even so, by Justin’s time, 100+ years after Jesus, the Romans were not about to accept the truth.

The light dawns slowly: but never too slow. It is God’s time, not ours.

When this writer first encountered the Church, it was simply to avoid falling into the Liberal Mainline trap of assuming “all the miracles in the Bible are just silly stories, we’ve outgrown all that now. We don’t need resurrected rabbis to be good people.” But even so, your host was aware that actually believing in resurrected rabbis – and virgin births and Sinai’s height and everything else in that storyline – would mean changes would need to happen. 21 years later God’s still working his purpose out. How can anyone else deserve less patience or mercy? As the dawn breaks for them, they may try to run west – or may, all of a sudden run screaming for joy into the light of that first and eternal morning, never looking back.

Morning comes when Jesus calls one to himself. A life lived in the light can not be the same as the one lived in darkness – but that was not life. Life is different from death.