He will swallow up death forever (First Sunday in Advent: The Prophets’ Candle)

Today I came to church harried, as usual. The only preparation I had made for Advent was breaking out the fancy red Christmas dresses for the girls, because it made dressing them on Sunday morning easier. But the sanctuary was beautiful in its Advent greenery, and when the choir began singing “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” I realized this was exactly what I had needed all along without knowing it. Jesus was coming. He was almost here, and I had the powerful urge to lay myself face down on the sanctuary floor and thank him for arriving.

It has been a rough year for depression. I spoke to two different friends recently who are struggling with it. I’ve had trouble with it myself, though not as badly as in the past. Both these friends said that they have been fighting the feeling that life doesn’t  have a point. Death seems not only inevitable, but desirable as a release from the drudgery and failure of life.

Advent disrupts this drudgery. On the first Sunday in Advent we light the Prophets’ Candle, the candle that symbolizes the long years that God sent messages through the prophets, promising the arrival of a Messiah. Tonight I talked to the girls about prophets and prophecy, and read to them this prophecy from the Book of Isaiah:

⁶ On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine — the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸ he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

⁹ In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

Christians read such passages as a prophecy of Jesus’ victory over death in the resurrection. By conquering death, Jesus has promised that those who trust in him also will conquer death. I have always read these passages as a simple promise of eternal life. But after this week, I am seeing death not only as the dreaded end of biological life, but as a dark force that we struggle against. Death has always been the enemy; depression makes it a saboteur as well, a conspirator who infiltrates our own minds and souls and snuffs out hope.

Jesus came to lift the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the winding sheet that covers our mouth and eyes so we cannot see or breathe. His birth into the world declares the end of the numbing routine of drudgery and failure. God can break into the world. God has. Rescue and salvation happened at the cross, and we are not trapped in our disgust at ourselves or our disgrace before others.

Sometimes it is hard to live up to the hope we’ve been given. The enemy still exists, and still needs to be fought. We still die, and our brains and bodies still tempt us to surrender to it. My depression has a dark arrogance: it insists that my despair and my self-disgust are not mental illness; they are insight. If everyone else only saw things clearly, it tells me, they would despise me too, or they would feel equally hopeless. My depression insists that my failures are total and irredeemable, and that only by conquering insurmountable challenges will I change anything.

But Isaiah says something else. “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us.” Change does not happen through us, but through God, and my fight is not to solve the unsolvable; my fight is to trust.  Depression stands on one side, the Empty Tomb on the other. Some of us need to make the choice over and over again. So every year Advent returns, telling us again that even routines can be broken and redeemed, and God has reached into ours and shaken it all to pieces. If we listen closely, we can hear the shroud tearing in half, and the host of the feast inviting us to come out and share the meal.

Advertisement