Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

 

 

When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own."

Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stairs. Ghosts, because many of us sense there's a spirit world, and don't know how to make sense of it, and don't know if it's benign. Witches, once blamed for bad crops, dying animals and sick children, in an age when we had no way of explaining the many types of human suffering visited upon us. Skeletons, because above all we fear death. Devils, because we know that we are far from innocent, each containing the capacity to do evil, though most of the time we keep it locked away.

As a Christian, why am I writing about all this? Shouldn't I be condemning it, whitewashing it, telling everyone to stay home with the lights off? Well, if you have small children or elderly relatives, that might be a wise move, but as a Christian I believe that All Hallows' Eve has something important to teach me. As a Christian minister I spend my time teaching people about the God who experienced all the horrors that life could throw at him. He was screamed at by angry crowds; he suffered terrible violence; he felt abandoned by God as the dark powers, both human and spiritual, had free reign. He even experienced our worst fear: death. God identified himself with a human corpse, lying dead and decaying in a tomb for two nights and a day. So as I walk down the street and see images of death and darkness, my Lord is there with me, because he is a stranger to none of it.

But All Hallows' Eve gives way to All Hallows, and then All Souls, two feast days many Christians have forgotten about, in which we celebrate the fact that the dead body of Christ did not stay dead. He did not come back just in a spiritual sense, either: the Christian hope of resurrection rests in the fact that when Jesus' followers went to the tomb on the third day after the crucifixion they found it empty, and then they met the living, breathing, solid, human Jesus, still bearing the marks of violence in scars on his hands and feet, but transformed.

C.S. Lewis wrote, in The Screwtape Letters, that there were two equal and opposite errors into which people could fall regarding the devil. The first was to have an unhealthy interest in him; the second was to deny his existence entirely. The devil, Lewis believed, was equally happy with either option. Revelling in horror, filling our minds with scary films and frightening images, is probably not helpful for anyone. Closing our eyes and ears to all that is dark in the world and in ourselves is not healthy either. As a follower of Jesus I can face up to my own darkness and even my own death knowing that he is there with me - and has changed the grave from a dead end to a thoroughfare.