“Thick Darkness.” Wait—have those words been in Exodus 20:21 all along and I’ve never heard them? Impossible. Yet, I didn’t remember them being there, so I looked up the reference in my NEB. Sure enough, the words are “dark cloud,” words that fit right in with vs. 18, which talks about thunder and lightning and smoke. Dark clouds accompany storms.
But “thick darkness where God was” (NIV and KJV and at least 13 other translations) connotes something well beyond a storm: it speaks to the mysterious, to the supernatural, to the other-ness of this God. He wasn’t in a storm that humans could comprehend; he was in a darkness, a thick darkness, a “total darkness” (CSV). The words make me think of having to go into an unfamiliar shuttered room in the middle of the night with no light to guide me. What do I do? I plant my feet slowly, holding my arms out straight in front of me with my hands ready to touch whatever may be to the front or side of me. I feel for objects that may give me a clue as to where I am and where I need to go. My sight is useless, usually my hearing is useless, so I must depend on touch.
Touch? Can we use the same sense to approach the “thick darkness where God was”? Is there something within the darkness that will give us clues as to the mystery that is God? We might look at Michelangelo’s painting “The Creation of Adam” as one interpretation. Painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it depicts God reaching out his finger to impart life to a fully-created Adam who is reaching out his finger to receive the life-giving touch. Of course, in the painting, there is no mystery about God: he is swathed in white robes and illumined with light, as is Adam.
Some have said that the figure of Adam, the creature, mirrors that of God, the creator. To some extent this is true. Both figures have reached out their index fingers for the coming touch of life. Their heads incline toward one another at the same angle, with eyes appearing to peer into the other’s eyes. Adam’s legs are in the same proximate positions as those of God. There, I think, is where the comparison ends. In the most important way, the figures foretell the constant nature of God toward humans and their inconstant response. God is straining with all his being toward Adam. His desire to give life is so strong that we can almost imagine an electrical impulse could jump the gap between his finger and Adam’s.
Contrary to the figure of God’s active energy reaching out, pulsing with life, is Adam’s reclining figure which lethargically lounges away from God. I’m sure that either an art critic or a theologian could take me to task on this, explaining more precisely the kind of mirroring that Michelangelo produced or the idea of Adam being an inert, thus lounging, being until the touch of God reaches him. Still, the overall effect of the direction of the body away from God speaks to the waywardness of humans who, from time immemorial, have been turning from God just as fast as He turns—and strains—toward them.
But God, the God who dwells in the “thick darkness” that is so incomprehensible and frightening to humans, found another way to reach out. He reached out by becoming one with the creature in the form of the man Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Nothing could be further from “thick darkness” than a human being who is just “one of us.” And, yet, Jesus wasn’t just “one of us” because he didn’t have that penchant for turning away from God, either in fear or rebellion. John 8:29 records Jesus’s words, “I always do what is acceptable to [God]” (NEB), John 14:31 records Jesus’s assertion, “I love the Father, and do exactly as he commands” (NEB), and, finally, three of the four gospels record versions of Jesus’s lines, “Not my will but thine be done” (NEB, Luke 22:42).
Beyond those words of how the human man Jesus reached out to, not recoiled from, the God of “thick darkness,” we have his striking declaration recorded in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall wander in the dark; he shall have the light of life“ (NEB). “The light of life”: could that be something very like the breath of life or the touch of life? Jesus shows us, through his life as recorded in the gospels, that he is total light—the total light of God that we need to reach out to him, to strain toward him as he strains toward us. And how do we step from the “thick darkness” into the light? By imitating Christ. By listening to or reading others’ wise counsel about how to imitate Christ. By attending to the means of grace as given in the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism.
Even then, when we are doing those things that bring light and life, we sometimes struggle with the darkness around us. We grow fearful; we grow rebellious because of those fears. Then, I think, we can walk confidently into that darkness, that “thick darkness” that is the mystery of God, knowing that, paradoxically, light, the light of Jesus, will be revealed in the center of the mystery.
A Myriad of Things 