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Raymond J. de Souza: Darkness descends over Egypt, echoing Passover's ninth plague

Due to the energy crisis caused by the war, shops and restaurants have been ordered to close early, and streetlights have been dimmed

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Darkness has descended upon Egypt.

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Due to the energy crisis caused by the American-Israeli war against Iran, shops and restaurants have been ordered to close early, and streetlights have been dimmed. Cairo, usually throbbing with commerce and conviviality into the early hours is quiet and dark.

Raymond J. de Souza: Darkness descends over Egypt, echoing Passover's ninth plague Back to video

There was darkness in ancient Egypt. It was the ninth of the ten plagues recorded in the Torah. The Lord God instructed Moses to call down darkness for three days upon Pharaoh and his countrymen, a darkness so thick, so deep, so complete that they could feel it. Pharaoh began to bend, ready to let Moses and his people go.

The definitive exodus from Egypt would await the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn. Passover. In most languages — but not English — the word for the Jewish Passover and Christian Easter is the same: Pâques, Pascua, Pasqua, Pascha. The Passover of the Lord was prepared by the previous plagues. The ultimate preparation was utter, total darkness, a hearkening back to before the beginning, to non-existence, to primordial emptiness.

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Darkness is nothingness. For anything to be, darkness must be dispersed, scattered, overcome. Hence the first words spoken of being, becoming, somethingness: “Let there be light!” And so there was light. Unknown to the ancients, light is splendidly both particle and wave, as all matter is. Light, then, is the first of all things, as quantum physics now teaches us, but which was already intuited in Genesis.

The ancient world was full of religion, and prior to the exceptionalism of the Jews, divinity was attributed to natural bodies — the sun, the moon, the seas and rivers. The greater lights were the greater gods. The greatest of the Egyptian gods, the presider in their pantheon, was Ra, the sun god. The plague of darkness dethroned Ra.

In the Hebrew understanding, there was light — the first day of creation — before the sun or the moon, before starlight (the fourth day). Whence did it come?

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Before the sun and the stars and the celestial fires, the light could only come from the source of being. As St. John the Apostle writes, “God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.”

How different the God of Israel, eternal light, from the kings of Egypt, who passed into eternity in the massive, monumental, magnificent pyramids, the inside of which no light could reach.

Light travels for years across the galaxies, but cannot penetrate the tomb. Whether covered by an enormous pyramid or a heavy stone, the darkness of the tomb is the domain of death, of non-existence, of nothingness. And into this darkness every person will go, whether the pharaoh in splendor or the pauper in squalor.

The darkness that descended upon Egypt was thus a sort of antechamber of death, the darkness of the grave extending to entomb for a time the living. The darkness served as herald to the plague of death, soon to follow.

On Easter morning comes the astonishing news that light has come from the grave itself. Mary Magdalene sets out for the tomb of Jesus, while “it was still dark” and finds the stone rolled away, and attending angels who appear like “lightning”. In the soaring prologue to John’s gospel, we read that the “light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

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“Let there be light” is better understood as the day of resurrection rather than the first chronological light, the radiance of the Big Bang emerging from nothing. All that is created eventually passes away, even the apparently endless energy of the sun and the stars. They collapse upon themselves into black holes, a darkness so complete that not even light can escape from it.

Everything moves toward the grave, to the final darkness, whether man or star. All creation is therefore a matter of marvelous melancholy if it ends in death. “Let there be light” is only temporary.

If “let there be light” is, though, definitively about the grave, about the empty tomb of Easter morning, then it is the light that is enduring and the darkness that passes away. The light that was aboriginally the extension of God into creation is now shared abundantly in eternal life beyond the grave.

War brings darkness, and proceeds from those darknesses — injustice, aggression, hatred — which plague history, estranged as man is from the original light.

The light returns to Cairo after the evening energy curfew. The light returned to ancient Egypt after three days. The light returned on the third day after Jesus was laid in the tomb. At Passover, the Lord God travelled ahead of Israel in a pillar of fire to give them light in the darkness. On that Jerusalem Sunday morning, the light conquered the darkness once and for all, leading from death to life.

A blessed Easter to our readers!

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