Watchman, what of the night?

Out of the dark of Seir a voice calls up to the watchman on the wall, and the question is the oldest one the night knows: watchman, what of the night? It comes twice, the way real dread repeats itself — how much is left, is there any end to this, will the dark ever break. The watchman's answer in Isaiah is famously cryptic: the morning comes, and also the night. The dawn is real, he says, but more darkness may come too; he will not lie about the second half to comfort you with the first. It is the honest answer of someone who has actually stood the long watches. But the question does not stay in Isaiah. Paul takes it up and answers the church far more boldly. The night, he says, is far gone, and the day is near. So far gone, in fact, that you can already start to dress for daylight — throw off the works of darkness, the things that belong only to the night, and put on the armor of light. The watcher who knows morning is coming does not merely endure the last hours. He begins, in the dark, to get ready for the day.

There is a way of waiting that is purely passive — hunched against the cold, counting the hours, doing nothing but surviving until the dark relents. And there is another way, the way Paul presses on a church still in the night. If the day is truly near, the dark hours change character. They stop being a sentence to be served and become a threshold to be dressed for. You can begin to live now as one who knows morning is coming — laying aside the deeds that only made sense in the darkness, the habits and despairs that assumed the night was permanent, and putting on instead the conduct of the daylight that is on its way. This is not pretending the night is over; the watchman is honest that it is not, that more dark may yet come. It is living by the certainty of the dawn before you can see it. The weary watcher who believes morning is coming keeps watch differently from one who fears it never will — and that difference, the dressing for a day not yet visible, is itself part of the turn.