The tension between the light and the darkness

This Easter has brought home to me the tensions that seem to lie at the very core of Christian life.. We live a strange existence of present agony in a fallen world, suffused by the promise of joy. We live in the present, but in the knowledge of eternity; standing on the border between the natural and the supernatural. And in the great Christian festival of Easter which has just passed, we are torn between sorrow at the terrible death endured by Jesus, and the knowledge that he had to die in order to for us to live.

On a daily basis we live with the tension between darkness and light - as night passes into day and day into night - a tension that is enacted out during our worship in the days leading up to Easter Sunday.

On Good Friday, between the hours of noon, when Christ was raised on the cross, until three in the afternoon, when he breathed his last; I sat before a bare altar stripped of decoration, meditating on his last words as one by one a candle was snuffed out to symbolise each utterance, leaving us in that terrible darkness. It was like a funeral for the world.

And then on Holy Saturday, I woke with a poignant sense of emptiness and loss (the same sensation that I felt the day after the deaths of my mother and father). The day felt bare and dark as we marked the terrible transition when, for a short while, Jesus dwelt with the dead. For those who live in relationship with Christ, it is perhaps the only day we feel separated from him, that we mourn the loss of that sense of indwelling; it is the day when we face the reality of death until the light one more dawns.

But as Jesus knew, without death there would be no resurrection; he could not have crossed that great divide between not being and being for eternity. ‘ For unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.’ (John 12:24). And therein lies the tension of our lives; the reality of the darkness of death that we strive to ignore, but without which life has no meaning or light..

As I sat in silence that day, I realised those of us who have faced cancer have been forced to face up to the reality of the death that awaits us all. It is a reality that I have gradually lost sight of since my the restoration of my health, but in doing so I seem to have also have lost sight of the preciousness of life. One of the strange realities of my experience with cancer was that, in facing my mortality, I felt more alive than ever before and the sense of the presence of God was almost incandescent. But as time has passed, I have lost that sense of intense joy of life, the sense of being fully alive, and become consumed once more by the concerns of the world; losing sight of the fact that each moment is a precious gift from God.

And in those hours of darkness I realised that to be fully alive we must live in the way of the cross: to live each day as if it were our last; to make each moment count. To glory not in our strength but know and embrace the fact that it is in our weakness that God works his purpose.To hold our lives lightly and to focus instead on Christ who crosses the boundary between darkness and light, who has destroyed death’s dominion over us and resolves all these tension. ‘For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.’ (Matt. 16:25)

Kate Nicholas’s book Sea Changed is available in Christian retailers and Waterstones throughout the UK and online at eden.co.uk and Amazon worldwide.