The date of 31 October is an interesting one. It is All Hallows Eve (meaning the day before All Saints Day), and it is also Reformation Day. In days of yore (and still today in Poland and other countries), 1 November was a day of feasting to celebrate the lives of saints and martyrs who had ‘gone before’. On the evening before people would fast and pray in remembrance. It was a sacred (hallowed) day and was taken seriously by Christians in past ages as they remembered the departed.
Now, of course, it has become twisted to celebrate the morbid side of death, with mockery and irreverence. With Hollywood’s influence, the macabre is relished and paraded with gusto: hence the gory films that are popular during the Halloween season. Once again, we have an example of how cleverly the world has turned something good into something so commercialised that the real meaning has evaporated in a ghoulish mist. On Halloween Christians may feel intimidated into going along with it, else they risk being called ‘killjoys’ or other such terms.
How to respond
Some respond by having an alternative to Halloween, whether it be a ‘Light Party’ or a ‘Hallelujah Party’. The point is that we will emphasise Jesus being the Light of the World. If Halloween is now about darkness and death to the modern mind, then we need to remind the lost that we need to live in the light. That is true in the physical world, and it is much truer in the spiritual world.
Imagine a world where there is no light. It wouldn’t actually exist for long. Light is critical for sight, safety, and growth. If we cannot live physically without light, then how do we expect to live spiritually without it? How can we grope our way to God in a world which we cannot see? We need the spiritual light that only Jesus Christ possesses, and we must cry out for that light with the same fervency with which we would cry out if we were enveloped in physical darkness.
Reformation Day
By one of those coincidences that only God can engineer, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the gate at Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, protesting against indulgences and other dreadful practices then carried out by the Roman Catholic Church. Within a short time, his protests had been translated into other languages, and the printing press multiplied the protesting monk’s objections all over Europe.
The Protestant church took 31 October and called it Reformation Day – a day when the light began to dawn on the Christian church. It had been under the darkness that the abuses of the Roman church had imposed, but now the light dawned in Wittenberg and rose upon the continent of Europe.
In 1517, the Roman Catholic Church – admittedly creaking at the seams under the constant questioning of those who came to be the Reformers – ruled the Christian world. Its power, prestige, and political clout were unrivalled, yet in a short time it lost much of that power as the Reformation transformed lives. That is what light does to darkness: it overcomes it.
So then, on 31 October why not have your light party? Tell others of Jesus, and take heart that on the same day many years ago, the light dawned upon benighted Europe. Let us pray that it will do so again, for God and his mercy and power have not changed. After all, it won’t be long before we are reading and celebrating the verse which says, ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.’
