by CCW | 16 December 2012 14:48
Among the many great and imaginative features of Dante’s poetic and theological Summa, The Divine Comedy, there is the amazing poetic invention of the Vestibule of Hell, a place deliberately designed by God, Dante suggests, for those souls unworthy of either Heaven or Hell! They are “a dismal company of wretched spirits” barely worthy of mention, who willed and then unwilled their will, unable to commit to anything. They follow for eternity the whirling banners of the ages, chasing first this and then that, utterly distracted and endlessly fickle. Vergil, the pilgrim Dante’s guide, explains that “they’re mingled with the caitiff angel-crew/Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him/were faithful, but to self alone were true.” Heaven has cast them forth and Hell rejects them too!
“But to self alone were true.” That is a haunting indictment of much of our contemporary world where being true to yourself has often been touted as the highest virtue, taking literally Polonius’ tendentious advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. What we have forgotten is what Dante knew. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to God and to the good order of his creation. Self-knowledge requires knowledge of others and of an objective order without which no knowledge is possible.
What happens to a culture when there is no longer any confidence in knowing or willing anything objective or true? Where there is nothing to live for, then, there are the conditions of mindless violence and evil such as what has happened in Newtown, Connecticut; the sad, mindless and wicked massacre of the little ones. No place is safe from such senselessness. We have seen in our own day too much of the massacre of the little ones. It is itself one of the hard themes of Christmas, the massacre of the Holy Innocents, which, while given a political reason, namely Herod’s fear of a rival to his throne, is also viewed as a kind of senseless act: “all the little boys he killed/At Beth’lem in his fury;” a senseless and disturbing act that nonetheless is gathered into the redemptive purpose of Christ’s holy birth. “Jesus Christ was born for this!” For only God alone can make sense of the mindless wickedness of human evil. As Bruce Cockburn puts it in “Festival of Friends”:
Some of us live and some of us die
Someday God’s going to tell us why
Open your heart and grow with what life sends
That’s your ticket to the festival of friends.
Like an imitation of a good thing past
These days of darkness surely will not last
Jesus was here and he’s coming again
To lead us to his festival of friends.
We want to know the reasons for the things which belong to human sin and wickedness, to all the forms of our radical unreason. But all too often we want things on our terms. The deeper challenge is to reclaim the vision of truth which constitutes the good of intellect and to will it in our lives.
For that reason, I love John’s question and Jesus’ response in the Eucharistic Gospel for today. It provides the interpretative matrix, I think, for our Morning Prayer lessons from Isaiah[1] and Matthew[2], the one opening out a vision of the Messianic kingdom; the other convicting and convincing us of our folly or our wisdom. Will we be like the foolish or the wise virgins? Will we make good use of the talents God has given us or will we hoard and hide them away? All in all, it is about how what we seek or desire ultimately defines us.
John is the voice in the wilderness but his question here is not from the wilderness of nature, the wilderness of the desert of Sinai, but from another kind of wilderness, the wilderness of prison, having upset the powers that be. It is what happens when truth speaks to power. But what defines John the Baptist is his desire for the righteousness of God. Jesus’ response to John’s disciples is wonderfully and powerfully clear. He says in effect that the Messianic Kingdom is being fulfilled in him. “Go and tell John again, those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.”
Isaiah, too, belongs to the prophetic way of which John the Baptist is the fulfillment, “a prophet,” to be sure, as Jesus says and yet “more than a prophet.” Why? Because of the one to whom he points us – Jesus, the one in whom all the themes of the Messianic kingdom, are met and realized. And what are those themes? The themes of redemption and restoration, the themes of righteousness and peace but all as rooted in the reality of the God who is Named.
The Messiah “will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.” It is surely what we pray for those who died in Newtown and for their families and friends. Isaiah goes on to remind us of the great and grand themes of the Advent. It is about our waiting and watching upon the great and grand motions of God coming to us. It means that something is required of us.
“Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” Matthew picks up on this theme and develops it further in the wonderful image of the wise and foolish virgins and the parable of the talents. Our watching and waiting are profoundly spiritual activities. They require our attention and our openness to God and to our thinking upon the things of God. “He therefore that would be saved,” as the Creed of St. Athanasius so arrestingly puts it, “let him thus think of the Trinity.” The Trinity? Yes. For this lies at the heart of the Christian faith and the Christian understanding. It has altogether to do with the Advent theme of Revelation. God makes himself known to us in the intimacy of the humanity of Christ. In him we hear and see the lessons of human redemption which he alone accomplishes for us and in us.
Article One of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (p. 699[3]) states clearly and unequivocally what has been forgotten in the vestibule world of our contemporary uncertainties and distractions.
“There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.” So it begins with a statement which captures the essential attributes of God which comprise the common teaching of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We neglect these at our peril and end up collapsing God into the maelstrom of our messed up wills and desires. Such concepts as the eternity of God, his indivisibility and unity, his infinite power, wisdom and goodness are a wonderful kind of distillation of theological reflection and understanding.
But the article goes on to state emphatically and clearly that “in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” God is named as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost out of a kind of intellectual and spiritual confidence that is open to what God makes known to us of himself. This is the great wonder of the Advent. God comes to us. God makes himself known to us without being the product of our minds.
We can make no sense of the Advent of Christ without thinking God. Christmas is about God made man and that is utter nonsense if we have forgotten about the nature of God. There is a sense in which God is this and not this, a sense in which God is utterly distinct from everything else in the created world as its Creator and sustaining principle and a sense, too, in which God is connected to everything in his creation. This is what is known as negative theology and positive theology. It is their interrelation that makes up the dynamic of Christian faith. The question of John the Baptist recalls us to the wonder of the Messiah. If only we will hear and see.
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, MP 2012
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