Year: 2011

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Churches”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

John the Baptist calls us to repentance. He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

The Word made flesh comes to birth through her because that Word now fully defines her being. It marks an ever deepening understanding of the Mystery to which she so completely gives herself. It is borne out of her faithful hearing, her constant attentiveness to the Word and Son of God.

These two figures recall us to the profounder principles of our spiritual identity. They challenge us about our engagement with the world, to be sure, but without being taken captive by either the rhetoric of an idealised future or the rhetoric of an idealised past. They recall us to God in the motions of his love towards us. Let him who has an ear “hear what the Spirit says to the Churches.” In a way, as Augustine remarks somewhere, “the Scriptures are like letters from home,” perhaps, even emails, we might say; they remind us of who we are essentially and spiritually.

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“Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see.”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

&John the Baptist calls us to repentance. His cry is the mantra of Advent: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He calls us to a fundamental change of outlook, a new orientation, a constant metanoia, which is nothing less than a radical transformation of attitude requiring renunciation and repudiation; in short, a resolute ‘no’ to the world.  Mary calls us to a willing acceptance of the one who comes. “Be it unto me according to thy Word.” Her ‘yes’ to God embodies the very nature of faith itself.

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The Psalms of David are the Prayer Book and Hymnal of both Jews and Christians alike. Classified in the Jewish understanding as one of the Writings, as distinct from the Law and the Prophets, the Psalms embrace a wide range of poetic forms of expression. The Psalter serves as a way of praying the Scriptures.

Among the many treatises of Augustine, one of the most charming and instructive devotionally is his Enarrations or Expositions on the Book of Psalms. For the English reader, it was only translated in the 19^th century as part of the project of recovering the Patristic heritage of the Church, an interest both in England and on the continent. E.B. Pusey, one of the outstanding figures of the Oxford Movement, provided in December of 1857 an advertisement for the translation into English of Augustine’s work on the Psalms. As he remarks,

St. Augustin was so impressed with the sense of the depth of Holy Scripture, that when it seems to him, on the surface, plainest, then he is the more assured of its hidden depth. True to this belief, St. Augustin pressed out word by word of Holy Scripture, and that, always in dependence on the inward teaching of God the Holy Ghost who wrote it, until he had extracted some fullness of meaning from it. More also, perhaps, than any other work of St. Augustin, this commentary abounds in those condensed statements of doctrinal and practical truth which are so instructive, because at once so comprehensive and so accurate.

This doctrinal and practical sensibility about the Psalms means, of course, that they are read in the light of a certain theology of Revelation. They are not read as a mine of historical information and they are not read ‘critically’ as that term has become to be used by the schools of biblical and historical criticism, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They are read with a certain insight into the nature of Scriptural Revelation. In Augustine’s case, they are read entirely from a Christian perspective as bearing constant testimony to Jesus as the fulfilling of the Law.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”

There is an ancient advent tradition about preaching on the Four Last Things: Death and Judgment, Hell and Heaven. The doctrine of the Last Things is called Eschatology. It is a part of the creedal understanding of the Christian Faith. At first glance, it may seem a rather dark and gloomy set of concepts; things that perhaps we would rather not think about at all.

The theme of judgment certainly appears in this Sunday’s gospel and certainly there is a disturbing aspect to it. “Signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars;” Jesus says, “and upon earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” Such words are apocalyptic, cosmic and cataclysmic and such words are a feature of the advent of Christ. “Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” This is, we might say, Luke’s Apocalypse. Yet what is at issue is not simply the idea of the end times or the idea of a cosmic judgment but our attitude and approach to judgment.

The strong message of this Sunday in Advent is that we can look upon these things with hope because of what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. Apocalypse means the unveiling of what lies hidden; in short, revelation. The very last book of the New Testament is the Book of the Revelation – the Apocalypse– of St. John the Divine. And far from being a book of predictions about when the end times will come, an interest which has fascinated people down throughout the ages and led to no end of prophecies about days and dates which, of course, as Jesus says, “no one can know,” we are offered an imaginative and brilliant way of thinking things from the perspective of eternity. In a way, that is what is being opened out to view.

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