In a Year of Bad News, What Would Good News Look Like?

As 2014 comes to a close, I am mindful of the onslaught of bad news that has afflicted our world this year. Ebola. Abuse of women and children. Respected leaders being revealed as abusers. Violence in the Middle East, Iraq, Ukraine, South Sudan.  An airliner disappearing into thin air. Another airliner shot out of the sky over Ukraine. Mass shootings. The suicide of a prominent comedian. Leaders who cannot seem to set aside their differences for the sake of service to their citizens. Broken relationships between blacks and whites in the United States.

So much bad news. So many reasons to despair. So little hope for humanity.

In the midst of the bad News of our broken world, I want to ask you, my readers: what would good news look like to you? You don’t have to answer this in spiritual terms. Just please share what hopeful news would look like for you. What do you long to see happen in the world? What would wholeness look like?

In the coming weeks of Advent, I’m going to be featuring a series framed around these themes. It will be called Bad News/Good News.

Before we can understand the Good News of the Gospel (literally, the Greek word euangelion means “good message”), we have to acknowledge that there is Bad News in the world today. Because there is fundamentally such a large amount of this Bad News, a lot of us are desperate for hope. I want to share how the Christian message as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ speaks into the darkness of our Bad News. Jesus is Good News incarnate because He came to be Immanuel, God with us. We are not alone in the darkness.

In the HBO series, True Detective, the main character Rust Cohle is lost in an existential morass. He contends with the problem of evil and is deep in despair; his solution for the problem of evil is that humans are merely matter and in fact should go extinct since they are a danger to creation. As he confronts darkness throughout the show’s arc, the viewer in no way expects him to encounter light or any measure of relief from despair. But when he is close to death, he has a vision that confronts him with the transcendence and love in the universe. Good News can happen to the most despairing. In one of the final scenes of the show, his detective partner, Marty Hart, wheels him out of his hospital room and out under the night sky. Rust looks up into the starry splendor.

RUST: It’s just one story, the oldest.

MARTY: What’s that?

RUST: Light vs. dark.

MARTY: …it appears to me the dark has a lot more territory….

RUST: You’re looking at it wrong–the sky thing. Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.

(camera pans to the starry sky)

Jesus’ incarnation among us meant that the pinpricks of light were beginning to pierce through the darkness. Genesis says that in the beginning the world was formless and void. It was a swirling mass of chaos and darkness. Then God created light and all of creation. And even though creation chose fallenness and brokenness over God, God has not given up on creation. He is still patiently pricking His light through the dark void. Chiefly He has done this through Jesus’ presence among us.

And the light’s gonna win in the end.

I look forward to sharing with you over the Advent season the Good News that Jesus brings to our Bad News world.