“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;
for those living in a land of deep darkness, a light has shined upon them.”
Light is pure energy. Where light is, there is life. A new physics is emerging that would explain the origin of life. Jeremy England of MIT explains that “when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.” He believes that this is the natural result of the law of entropy. Everything eventually breaks down. And entropy is not a destructive force but rather a creative one for it tends to dissipate energy throughout the universe. “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
Imagine the sun, burning in an almost unending series of thermonuclear reactions. When energy is released it radiates light all around. The light we get from the sun is the energy that makes life possible on earth. Light is life.
If light is life; then darkness must be death. Darkness is the destructive force in the universe. Physics also talk about dark matter and dark energy. And the thing is, dark matter and the ordinary matter we can observe (baryonic matter) tend to cancel out each other. And dark energy and light energy also tend to cancel out each other. But since the universe exists, there must be more of light energy than there is of dark energy. Because we exist, then light must be stronger than darkness.
This is heavy physics. And I am not even sure that I have captured it accurately. Not everyone would be able to understand this. But this is what the story of Christmas is telling. With the birth of Christ, we see the coming of the light. People living in darkness will see a great light. In simple terms, the Christmas story tells us that Christ brings us light as much as the sun makes life on earth possible because it bathes the earth with each light.
Christmas tells us that light is stronger than the darkness; that live is stronger than death; that love is stronger that hatred. The Baby Jesus brings us hope that all that we are afraid of (darkness, death, hatred) will dissipate and disappear before the power of His light.