When there is nothing.

Nothing.

I came across a fascinating line this week in a Times article about supermassive black holes. One observatory had been searching a distant galaxy for traces of carbon monoxide—and found none. One of the researchers, Dr Jan Scholtz, commented: “What surprised us was how much you can learn by not seeing.”

The absence itself turned out to be significant. Nothing, it seems, can matter.

This immediately reminded me of a line from Sherlock Holmes. In Silver Blaze, which I read as a teenager, Holmes solves the mystery by noticing the dog that didn’t bark. The silence is the clue. What failed to happen reveals more than all the things that did.

Nothing, it turns out, can be very important—sometimes even foundational. Nowhere more so than in our Christian faith, which is grounded on a nothing. A total absence. The Good News itself begins there. We are talking, of course, about the empty tomb. No body. Nothing.

The crucial point is that the first Easter proclamation is a negative one. Resurrection is announced not by a sighting but by an absence. “He is not here,” says the angel. That nothing, paradoxically, is the good news.

“The tomb was empty,” preached Bishop Augustine in an Easter sermon, “not because the body was stolen, but because death itself had been defeated.”

Once again, the upside-down Gospel, as the greatest theologian of the 20^th century, Karl Barth, memorably observed: “Nothingness is not a threat to God; it is the canvas of creation.”

Remember the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, his triumph over the priests of Baal as he called down God’s consuming fire on the altar on Mount Carmel?   The outcome is that hee is spiritually exhausted and takes flight into the wilderness.  Here God directs him to Mount Horeb where he experiences a powerful wind, followed by a shattering earthquake, then a fire. 

Then we read: “But the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” (1 Kings 19:12)   You may remember this from the Authorised Version as the “still, small voice.” I’ve consulted my Hebraist daughter on this phrase: literally “a silent, delicate or thin voice.”

How can silence have a voice? Yet this is how God summons the broken prophet. God reveals himself not in overwhelming power, but in quiet presence. He was not in the noise that frightened Elijah, but in the silence that stayed with him.

We find this again and again in the Psalms, where God sometimes seems absent. A recurring cry is: “Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1). The psalmist is not saying God cannot be seen, but that God is choosing not to be seen. He speaks directly to God: “You are here—why are you holding back?”

The psalmist cries out because God seems hidden; Elijah discovers that God’s hiddenness may itself be the way God draws near. Neither receives an explanation, but both receive enough of God’s presence to continue.

Psalm 10 ends with a quiet confession: “The LORD is king for ever and ever,” while Elijah leaves Horeb with renewed vocation.

The most profound absence of all, however, is experienced by Jesus on the cross. At Golgotha, God is more silent than anywhere else in Scripture. There is no thunder, no voice from heaven, no dramatic intervention—only darkness, breath, and a dying prayer. Nothing.

Jesus cries the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God does not answer—not because God is gone, but because God is bearing the full weight of the moment without explanation.

Creation begins with God speaking but at Calvary, God says nothing. Not because he has nothing to say, but because he is doing everything that can only be done in silence. This is not divine weakness, but the very opposite, even the power of God.

No wonder Paul writes: “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians: 1:18). This is how God works, something we need to get our heads around:  For the apostle goes on to say that God chooses what the world regards as nothing in order to undo what it thinks is everything (1 Corinthians 1:28).

Our faith, then, is not frightened by emptiness, silence, or apparent absence. We may choose to trust that God works most deeply where nothing is obvious, measurable, or impressive. The empty tomb, the silent cross, and the sheer silence on Horeb all speak the same truth: God’s saving power does not shout. It waits. It withholds explanation. It invites trust.

In a world desperate for signs and proofs, Scripture teaches us to attend to what is missing. When God seems hidden, faith dares to believe that this very hiddenness may be the place where grace is already—quietly—at work.

Nothing does not deter us; it steadies us, trains our attention, deepens patience, and teaches hope when certainty disappears away.  As Eugene Peterson, who gave us the Message translation observes: “God is at work even when nothing seems to be happening.”

So we learn to wait, to listen, to trust what we cannot see. For sometimesnothing is not the end but the place where grace is already at work.