Halloween: a challenge and an encouragement

It's a really Halloween-y night out there isn't it? Just the right amount of gloom, purple-tinted clouds, and long shadows, to create an atmosphere of dark creepiness...


This isn't an opinionated piece on the rights and wrongs of Halloween, more so a couple of things which I've felt God showing me over the last few days. Specifically - how we should be challenged by this festival, and how we should be encouraged by it too.

Halloween offers us the chance to study exactly how we as Christians can relate to ideas of "light" and "dark" in the world. These verses from the Message translation of John's gospel sum up brilliantly  - "This is the crisis we're in: God-light streamed into the world, but men and women everywhere ran for the darkness. They went for the darkness because they were not really interested in pleasing God." (Read more).


It's an idea most of us will be fairly familiar with - in the Bible, dark represents evil, stuff God hates, the place we are found in when Jesus reaches out to rescue us. Light, on the other hand, is stuff God craves from us, the good ways in which we obey God. 
Jesus is our perfect picture of light, as he came into a dark world, and lit up the way for us to escape the darkness and enter the brightness of our Father's kingdom.


So how does Halloween challenge us? We are called to be like Jesus - and that means to shine in dark places. Regardless of our practical stance on Halloween we can do this. For those who boycott - what an opportunity to share our views on Jesus' light! For those involved in Halloween activities, the challenge to shine is the same. In the darkness of a festival which primarily celebrates darkness, we as Christians must light up the room with our words and actions.


And how does Halloween encourage us? Whilst the actual celebration of All Saints' Day is largely forgotten it is a day on which we traditionally remember all those Christians who have died. All Saint's Day, then, is a celebration of the promise of heaven.

How brilliant that this comes after the celebration of darkness. Halloween offers Christians the chance to look forward to Jesus coming again, when darkness will be defeated once and for all in triumphant light.


I have certainly felt challenged and encouraged in equal measures this Halloween. Not only does God call us to action in terms of us being lights in the darkness, he gently reminds us that day follows night. Though tonight is dark, scary, and full of all kinds of darkness - Jesus' death allows us to look forward to the morning, when our deliverance from darkness to light will be completed.