Light and Life in 2021

Trapped between nostalgia and anticipation, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is, for some, full of continued celebration of the holidays. For others it is full of melancholy, thinking back to the past year’s mistakes and regrets, or anticipating with dread what terrors the new year might bring. To be honest, I tend toward the latter, with reflection upon the past year and turning toward the new year as part of a rhythm I have always enjoyed, if sort of darkly.

But in reality the passage of time is the same. Day to day, week to week, year to year. Even as we celebrate the New Year, this time with empty streets and perhaps an even greater sense of foreboding for what 2021 might bring, we perhaps forget that God is the same God as he was in 2020, 2019, and every year before that.

It turns out that another saying of Stanley Loverin rings true: “It is a day like any other day, and you are there.” There are many of these sayings. I used to marvel at the cynical, Stoic vision of my father, and yet now in adulthood I can see the right of it. From the standpoint of faith, “a day like any other” is a reminder that God is still present, immanent, intimate in the passage of time, in the unceasing closing and opening of each new day. How could it be otherwise?

The world can be a dark place. Especially as we reflect on 2020, and anticipate that 2021 could be worse. But even if it were, wouldn’t God still be God? Does anything stop the Divine from being divine?

We’ve all had “bad years” in the past - maybe yours was 2020 or 2017 or 2002 or 1995. I wonder: was 2020 filled with darkness or light for you? Both? What are you anticipating in 2021?

In the Bible, Job had a really bad year. He lost everything and everyone he loved, well, except his wife. His year (technically for him, it all happened in a single day/hour) was so crushing that he cursed the day of his birth, wishing he had never been born. His wife’s advice? “Curse God and die.” In other words, get it over with - there’s no point to you going on. Thanks for that. Job's reply, "Why should we receive only good things from God and not bad things too?" Maybe even the bad things are good for us, somehow.

We empathize with Job’s suffering - we see our sufferings echoed and magnified in Job’s suffering. We relate to his demanding an audience with God - an answer to the “Why” question. We relate to the injustice of his friends’ accusations against him, namely that he was suffering a punishment for the wrong that he did.

Yet we are also challenged and reminded by Elihu (Job’s fourth and sometimes forgotten friend), that perhaps God actually sends all these troubles on us - in whatever year, or in a year like 2020 - to save us from an even greater disaster, such as a disaster in our souls. To turn us back to him, to pull us out of the pit, to snatch us away from death and the grave, and restore us to the light.

For followers of Jesus, we know and experience him as this light of life, this rescue from death and destruction.

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. John 1:4

Whoever follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. John 8:12

And so here we are, in “a year like any other year.” The path of wisdom gives us eyes to look back and see God at work in 2020. In the good and the bad, in the grief, sorrow and loss. Not only with wisdom and the fear of the Lord, but with confidence and assurance of light and life in the coming year. Because we believe God is still God in 2021, we anticipate the coming year not with dread, but with wisdom, confidence and the eternal light and life that springs from the strangely human figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Happy 2021, and I'll see you soon.

Grace and peace,

MHL