The Horror of Great Darkness and the Wings

Waiting Between the Carcasses and the Stars — A Reflection for Fifth Week of Great Lent on Isaiah 40:18-31 and Genesis 15:1-15

You have been fasting five weeks now. The body knows it—this thinning, this slow hollowing that Lent works upon the flesh. And something else knows it too: that deeper hunger the fast was always meant to surface, the one no bread can answer. You have been stripped, layer by slow layer, of the idols you did not know you worshipped—comfort, control, the carefully gilded images of a god small enough to manage. Isaiah’s question lands now with peculiar force: To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? (Isaiah 40:18). The prophet is not mocking pagans. He is mocking you. He is mocking the domesticated deity you have been carrying through Lent like a pocket charm—the god who exists to fix your problems, to reward your fasting, to make the darkness stop.

That god must die before Pascha comes.

Consider what the Church has done, setting these readings beside the healing of the epileptic boy in Mark 9. A father brings his seized, convulsing child to the disciples and they cannot heal him. O faithless generation, Christ says, and the word faithless does not mean lacking belief but lacking the capacity to bear the weight of the real God—the God who sits upon the circle of the earth, who stretches heaven like a curtain, who calls every star by name and loses not one. The disciples had been arguing about greatness. They had fashioned a graven image of messiahship—golden, stable, immovable—and it could not cast out a single demon. Gregory Nazianzen knew this sickness: “The theologian who has not prayed has only decorated an idol with better words” (Oration 27.3). Your Lent has been bringing you to this threshold. You have fasted, prayed, given alms—and still the convulsions continue. Still the child in you seizes and falls into fire.

Good. Stay there. Do not flee this place.

For Abram too was brought to this threshold. God led him outside, beneath that immense and pitiless sky, and made a promise so vast it was nearly cruel: Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be (Genesis 15:5). And Abram believed—the text says it plainly, and we rush past it as though belief were simple. But then watch what happens. Abram asks for a sign. God does not rebuke the asking. He commands the strange archaic rite—heifer, goat, ram, dove, pigeon, all split and laid open, the raw halves facing each other in the ancient covenant-form, blood pooling between the pieces. Abram drives away the carrion birds. And then, when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him (Genesis 15:12).

Here is the heart of the Fifth Week. The horror of great darkness is not punishment. It is the necessary passage. Between the stars and the promise lies a valley of split flesh and descending night. Between your Lenten discipline and the Paschal feast lies something you cannot manage, arrange, or gild. Maximos the Confessor writes that “the one who has genuinely renounced worldly things and sincerely serves his neighbour through love soon frees himself from every passion and becomes a partaker of divine love and knowledge” (Centuries on Love 1.25)—but that word soon conceals a chasm. The freeing comes through the darkness, not around it. Christ will shortly tell His disciples, The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day (Mark 9:31). They understood not that saying. Neither, perhaps, do you. Neither, perhaps, must you—yet.

For what God reveals to Abram in the horror is not comfort but truth: thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years (Genesis 15:13). The promise is real. The stars do not lie. But the road to their fulfillment passes through Egypt, through affliction, through four centuries of groaning. Isaiah knows this: Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall (Isaiah 40:30). Your strength will not carry you. Your discipline will not carry you. Your carefully constructed spiritual identity—that golden image, that tree that will not rot—will not carry you. Only the God who fainteth not, neither is weary (Isaiah 40:28) can carry what you cannot.

And here is the astonishing thing: in Abram’s vision, it is God alone who passes between the pieces. The smoking furnace and burning lamp move through the split carcasses while Abram sleeps. God binds Himself. God takes both sides of the oath. God says: if this covenant is broken, let it be My flesh that is torn. Do you see? The cross is already here, hidden in the horror of great darkness, in the blood-soaked ground of an ancient covenant. Irenaeus saw it: “The Word of God was made man, and the Son of God became the Son of Man, that man might receive adoption and become the son of God” (Against Heresies 3.19.1). The God who cannot be likened to any image becomes flesh. The God enthroned above the circle of the earth passes between the carcasses.

So you wait. Two weeks remain before Pascha. The carrion birds descend—distraction, despair, the old familiar voices telling you this darkness means God has forgotten. Drive them away. Why sayest thou, O Jacob, My way is hid from the Lord? (Isaiah 40:27). It is not hidden. It passes through the horror. The father in Mark cried, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24)—and that raw, honest, half-broken prayer was enough. Enough for the child to be healed. Enough for the dead-looking boy to be taken by the hand and lifted.

They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles (Isaiah 40:31). The Hebrew for wait is qavah—to bind together, to twist like cord. You are being bound to God in this darkness, wound tight as rope, strong as covenant. The wings come. But first the night. First the horror. First the honest cry. Stay.

Lent, darkness, covenant, eagles, theosis, fasting, Pascha, incarnation, kenosis, transformation