“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”
Advent celebrates the pageant of God’s Word coming to us. That is its great wonder, the miracle, really, of God’s revelation. There is something more than our words.
Scripture in our Anglican Christian understanding is God’s Word Written. What? Did God write the Bible? No. The Bible is a veritable library of books written by human hands over vast tracks of time and in different places and even different cultures. Writing, after all, is one of the outstanding features of our humanity, the tangible expression of thoughts and ideas which we once knew as distinguishing human beings from the birds and the bees, from dust and darkness. And yet, the Scriptures, literally, the writings, are regarded as God’s Word, conveying ideas and concepts that are literally not of our devising but of God’s revealing to us and through us. That, too, is all part of the marvel. To speak of the Scriptures is God’s Word Written is to make a profound theological statement.
The connection between God and Word is central to the spiritual understanding of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Muslims, God’s Word recited by the Angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed creates the Qu’ran, a work which is only holy, only the recitation of Allah’s Word, in the Arabic language. It cannot be translated and still be the Qu’ran just as there can be no other Christ than Jesus Christ for Christians, no substitute avatars. For Jews and Christians, of course, the Scriptures are capable of translation from one language to another. Why? Because of the Word beyond, behind and within the words. The idea of God and his Word opens us out to the special qualities of revealed religion; to the idea that God reveals his will for us and, especially in the Christian understanding, reveals himself to us as well as revealing ourselves. Such is the light and the darkness of Advent.
That is why there is such a strong emphasis upon the reading and the proclaiming of the Word of God. What is assumed is that God wants us to know certain things, things that are conveyed through the written word and that word as proclaimed and heard.
This is a critical feature of the revealed religions that is often overlooked and ignored. Even in our Churches, the Scriptures are often derided or dismissed, relegated in sermon after sermon to some distant past that no longer speaks to us. If so, why read them at all? Why grant them primacy? And indeed, for some churches the Scriptures are pushed off to the side, viewed as inconvenient though not necessarily as true. There is a certain kind of scholarship, as the late Christopher Lasch noted, that rebels against the idea of things from the past speaking to our present while a more prophetic understanding seeks to see allusions and affinities from the past in the present. The past, it is famously said, is another country, but if it cannot speak to us then from whence are we? Either the Scriptures are relegated to some warehouse of the past, stored up as quaint relics of an outmoded and outdated yester-year, irrelevant and meaningless, or the past is ignorantly or wilfully misrepresented to justify the present. All is now. Or? Is there another option? Could it be that the Scriptures might be allowed to have their way in their integrity and unity to shape us into the divine understanding? This is the holy way of the doctrine of revelation. It is part of an Anglican confidence in Revelation, the idea that there is wisdom to be found in the Scriptures.
Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the Epistle and Gospel readings for Holy Communion and concentrated beautifully in Cranmer’s outstanding Collect, a Collect composed by him that enshrines the theology of revelation for Anglicans. It is a high view of Scripture.
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul avows, in this powerful passage from Romans. He has in mind the entire parade of the Jewish Scriptures but now seen in a new light, the light of Christ. As Luke makes so strikingly clear, too, there is something eternal in God’s Word that contrasts completely with the fading splendours of the world. Sic transit gloria mundi – so passes the glory of the world. The Word of God, which calls the heavens and the earth into being, abides and remains in ways that the heavens and the earth cannot. Their being depends utterly and entirely upon the Eternal Will and Word of God. The contrast here is between what is created in time and what is eternal, from everlasting. God’s Word is eternal.
Advent would awaken us to the coming of God’s Word in the pageant of Law and prophet, in thundering judgment and consoling mercy, and, above all, in “the Word made flesh” through the Blessed Virgin Mary. Advent awakens us to hope. This is the Christian insight that turns the tragedy of the ancient world into the comedy of the Christian world, albeit a serious comedy. God reveals something of his truth and majesty to us because our truth is found in our being with him. God comes to us and only so can we come to him. This is the central theme. It signals the idea that we have an end with God.
This allows us to face all of the struggles of each and every age and the sense of the end time, too. Everything else passes away but God’s eternal Word shall not pass away. In the mercies of Christ, God’s Word and Son, we have been given the hope of everlasting life. What does that mean? It means that the truth of our humanity does not lie in the things of passing worth but in the eternity of God and in his eternal Word.
Cranmer puts it best in his homily on the reading of Scripture. “He that keepeth the word of Christ is promised the love and favour of God and that he shall be the dwelling place or temple of the blessed Trinity.” Through our attention to the pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the Word proclaimed and in the Sacraments celebrated, we pray that “we may evermore dwell in him, And he in us,” as The Prayer of Humble Access puts it.
The opening out of the Scriptures in the confidence of their creedal intelligibility is a distinctive feature of our older Anglican Christian understanding. It is not really possible to talk about the Bible as the Bible without acknowledging the Creeds. For that reason, the Scriptures were translated and taught and a pattern of reading was established with the aim, articulated by William Tyndale, that every ploughboy (and girl!) would be as well versed in the Scriptures as any learned clerk from the universities. The Bibles were placed and opened upon the lecterns in the Churches. A noble and an ennobling vision. It was to be an open book but in the confidence of the creedal understanding about God and our humanity which comes out of the Scriptures themselves and without which they are a contradictory and confusing pile of words, open to endless speculation, all of which is at the expense of their integrity and unity as Scripture. Just a mystifying pile of junk. Why bother? It bothers the light-weight atheists of our day that anyone might just bother to think the Scriptures at all. The more thoughtful are not quite so dismissive.
In sixteenth century England, Bibles were chained to the lecterns so that people wouldn’t run off with them into their private homes. That serves as a metaphor, too, I think, as a check against our running off with our own private interpretations of the Scriptures. For then we deny that they are “written for our learning.” Truth cannot be a private affair but must be catholic, for all.
At issue for us in Advent and always is whether we will be open to the opening out of God’s Word to us, written and proclaimed but creedally understood as being part and parcel of our participation in God’s own thinking and life. Such is the theology of revelation. A wonder, a miracle, a joy even in the midst of trying times. Advent recalls us to the motion of God’s Word towards us. It is our only salvation.
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent II, 2013