Promises in the Dark
Appropriately for this time of year, today’s reading from the Second Book of Samuel finds King David at rest in his palace after a day of very corporeal celebration (dancing, feasting) in God’s honor. He is “settling in,” as the writer tells us, for the royal equivalent of a long winter’s nap.
Alone at last, well-feasted and enjoying his leisure in a “house of cedar,” the king feels a twinge of conscience regarding the dwelling place of God: the ark of the covenant sits in no palace, but a tent. David expresses his compunction to the prophet Nathan. In terms of royal hospitality, can’t he do a little better than that?
Surely, this is the point (although it isn’t represented in the narrative) where God laughs —charmed by David’s naivete. That night, God gives Nathan a message to convey to the king, laced with gentle irony: “Should you build me a house to dwell in?” It is I who chose you, God reminds David, who raised you up from nothing.
Far from mean-spirited, God’s comment isn’t meant to belittle David’s generous impulse, but merely to remind him of where the king’s strength actually lies: not in the illusion of power and choice, but in his littleness, his humility, his dependence on the God whose power exceeds all human understanding. It was for that littleness, after all, that David was chosen. It is the small, the lowly, and the unnoticed who can be raised. Those who occupy earthly thrones can only be toppled from them—for where else is there left for them to go? David was destined for greatness precisely because he understood that his reliance on God was absolute. His lack of arrogance is shown in the preceding chapter, when a princess chastises the king for celebrating “like any vulgar fellow” with the common folk, “dancing with all his might… half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants!” David’s retort gives us a sense of his priorities, as well as the reason why God believes he has the makings of a great king. He declares (italics mine), “I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of—I will be held in honor.”
One of David’s most endearing qualities is his gift for critical self-examination. He doesn’t always make the wisest choices, but he’s always ready to own up to his mistakes. Like other chronic biblical screwups (think Peter, Jonah, Paul), this awareness of his imperfections and his dependence on God makes David a standout in the roster of Israelite kings—the improbable chosen one from whom a whole nation’s destiny will spring. Psalm 89 confirms this catalog of God’s promises not only to David, but also for generations: greatness, peace, prosperity. Israel is claimed as God’s own, and David’s throne “shall stand firm forever.” God’s care and attention to this covenant never wander, the psalmist assures us; it is only for us to recognize the fact.
And yet, this idyll comes up short. The ever-attentive God, the deathless covenant, a people blessed and protected, a guaranteed home that endures forever—where are these things reflected in the cold realities of human life? Only in the cozy lies that we are told as children, the cynic might protest, and nowhere else. After all—even the mountain of gifts on Christmas morning doesn’t come from the benevolent old bishop, but mostly from sweatshops, ferried across polluted seas and down traffic-choked highways, delivered to harried parents by overworked couriers—where’s the magic in that? “I have been with you wherever you went,” God murmurs to David, “I have destroyed all your enemies.” Yet even David’s last days were not happy ones. God offers the king protection from enemy armies—but not from the king’s own self? David dies regretful, broken, old, and alone: the golden boy no longer.
The world—the realities, rather than the poetic fantasy, of human life—has a way of trashing our dreams. Promises are swallowed in darkness: feelings of bitterness and self-loathing, betrayal, and rage directed at those who we thought were on our side but weren’t. We, too, have forgotten the taste of beauty and goodness; injustice, rather than the righteousness of divine promise, reigns.
So, it also must have seemed in first-century Palestine. Mary, Joseph, and the whole Nativity crew could have been forgiven for thinking that the world’s gone to hell. The encounters and parables of Jesus a few decades later offer us a disturbing glimpse of that reality. Everywhere we find the untrammeled power of a few who were content with the suffering of the many; the community devouring itself. A devout Jew of Jesus’ time might well have asked, reading Samuel’s comforting words: “Where is God and all those promises now?”
Today, it appears that little has changed in the land of Jesus’ birth—or anywhere else. Hatred is rampant. Lives are ravaged, families shattered, making a hideous mockery of all we thought we’d learned in the last two thousand years. We trade accusations and justifications, and we cotton ourselves in distraction and indifference, but the suffering continues, whether or not we’re paying attention. Those old promises seem extinguished, nothing more than smoke in the air. We are alone in the dark.
Christina Rossetti is not the only one who has written on the bleakness of midwinter and the heightened awareness sharpened sensibilities it brings. Winter is a time of change. Some swift and stark, some subtle and hidden, working deep underground as a mystery to the human gaze. Winter is a falling away so that something new can emerge; the season of cocooning, where young, growing things like to hide away and undertake their miracles of transformations in private. “The mystery kept secret for long ages,” Paul writes the Romans, “but now made manifest…according to the command of God.”
Winter is a time of gathering gloom and introspection, of feelings cut off from the world and thus intensified by their own craving for privacy; a time of self-absorption, when people put aside the freedom and conviviality of summer, to take stock and look to their own. One feels a sense of urgency and not a little dread ahead of what lies before us once flowers and warmth are packed away, and the surfaces of life are laid bare.
Winter is also the season of darkness. The bright hours grow fewer and fewer. In the earliest days of humankind, each winter might bring the same nagging fear: what if this is the year they disappear altogether, and never return? The range of colors grows narrower in the winter, the choices starker and more exigent. Death draws a little nearer. It is no surprise that many choose this season to let go of life.
Today, it seems as if our winter never ends. We feel enclosed by the ice that stops hearts and locks us away from one another, from life itself. Like the ancient peoples, we are watching our days grow ever shorter. At our poorest, lost from God, from ourselves, and each other, we cry out ad extremis; we are the seed buried in the frozen earth, hidden, forgotten, alone. The seed that no longer even recognizes itself—for there, in solitude and unknown to anyone, strange things are happening.
Into the realm of darkness, God came. David, the Israelites, Mary and Joseph—why should we wonder that God’s favor rests on the hidden people—people who wander and doubt, who sense their aloneness, their utter dependency, who worry that they are not enough? It is to these people that God bestows a secret power—so secret, that mostly it is something only God sees. God, who alone senses the magic unfolding below a surface that to human eyes appears naked and denuded of life.
For God chooses David—the spare, sent off to tend the sheep. Jesse had so many sons, bigger, stronger, probably smarter, and more capable in all the usual ways; sons with knowledge of the world. Yet God chooses the little one, alone on the hillside with the wind and the rain.
Consider this: Who was more powerless in premodern societies than a young woman? Whether noble or humble, slave or free, she is the poorest of all, for her entire life’s trajectory is the property of men. What woman in first-century Palestine has the power to take fate into her own hands, to chart a destiny neither guided nor decided by father, brother, husband, or son? Highly unlikely, almost impossible to imagine—yet in one instance, that is exactly what happens.
God turns the very source of a young woman’s vulnerability—her womanhood—into a means of cosmic salvation. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary cries, “for God has done great things for me.” Her Yes is often portrayed as an act of meek obedience—a means of taming, and imprinting the familiar pattern of “man orders, woman submits” upon this astonishing act, where God smashes the barrier between heaven and earth on behalf of humanity. Instead, God offers Mary a partnership (she’s not known as Co-Redemptrix for nothing) in the salvation of the world; here is no timid servant carrying out the command of her lord. The incarnation of Jesus comes about when Mary herself senses that the season of waiting is at an end; God has whispered to her: Now is your time, you are ready. Come forth, break the surface, and dazzle the world.
Alone in the dark, all we have left is our humanity: God’s great gift. It is the shining jewel at the bottom of the treasure chest that can never be lost or stolen. To refuse the illusions of both greatness and despair; to reject the temptation to sit as judge on one another, and to remember, as David did, that we are all unfinished work; to bask in the radiance of our very being, as creatures who are made to love and be loved—to feel this, to know it, even in the loneliest chambers of our hearts; to suspect (is it ever more than that? A hint, a murmur) that beneath the surface, something wondrous has been happening all along. This is where hope dwells, hope like that which ancient peoples placed in the solstice: One day, our light will return. A light, as we will hear John proclaim on Christmas morning, “which shines out in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
The birth draws near. In our wintry world, amidst the darkness, atoms are furiously rearranging themselves into our Salvation. What is required of us? That we are ready. Like midwives, we must be patient, watchful, rich in compassion and fortitude, waiting and working through all long hours of the night at the side of she who labors. We are all she has, you and I: it’s us, or nobody.
Hold fast to hope. It is the power of our littleness and our reliance on God and each other that makes us strong. Hold fast to that promise, even in the dark.
Lori Frey Ranner is a New Orleans native. She holds a B.A. in History and Classics from Loyola University New Orleans and an M.Phil. in Byzantine Studies from the University of Oxford (Keble, 1996), with a concentration in Ecclesiastical History. Her area of academic specialization is Latin and Greek ecumenical relations in the period following the Fourth Crusade. Between 1999-2014, she held the post of lecturer at Loyola New Orleans in the Departments of History and Classics. She currently teaches Latin, Ancient Greek, and World Religions at Ursuline Academy. Lori is married and a mother to three children. In her random bits of free time, she is writing one novel, editing a second, and turning a third into a podcast.