Have you ever had the experience of losing all the electric power in your home? A friend of mine, who has a cabin on a woodland lake, told me that the worst part of the experience was that he kept flipping on switches as he went from room to room. He was so used to being able to summon up illumination this way, his subconscious kept insisting that it ought to work. The result was that he became increasingly frustrated with fumbling in the dark. He finally gave up and went to bed, only to be awakened when every light in the house came back on at 3:00 in the morning!

This business of walking in the dark (before Christ) is a major theme we see all over the New Testament. It perhaps springs from the Messianic prophecies such as Isaiah 9:1-2, which Matthew quotes at the beginning of his gospel…