In Munich, Germany, a neighborhood and a Home Depot have been built right around the corner from Dachau. We hide our death camps behind subdivisions and shopping centers. We stack lumber where once we piled corpses. We build lives where once we ripped them apart. It’s all a part of the concerted effort to convince ourselves that “it’s not so dark here.” But upon realizing that this is the game we play, we finally find the real horror of it all.

“But wait a minute! Christmas is only a few days away! We don’t talk of such things now! Death camps and other unspeakable things have nothing to do with Advent!” Or so we say. But, no. They have everything to do with Advent and Christmas. The King of Glory wrote Himself into our horror script, wore the fear and the brutality of it Himself, all in order to write us out of it. The King is born in a zoo and killed on a slaughterhouse cross so that we could inherit paradise, and all on His back. It’s why Israel looked forward to His first coming, and we should look forward to his second. Days of darkness in God’s distance give way to days of light in His presence.

And the surprise ending to beat them all is this—there is no surprise ending. Usually in horror films, just when we think the evil has been thwarted, it makes one last frightening stab at carnage. But not here. It is just us, joined inseparably to the Father by the work of the Son, through the Spirit—forever. And horror becomes comedy.