“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”
Strong words, but then, this is a day of strong words, strong words reminding us of the strength and power of God’s Word coming to us in judgment and in hope.
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul tells us in a powerful passage signifying the fundamental idea of a theology of revelation, a point by no means lost on the architect of common prayer and the author of the fine and wonderful collect for The Second Sunday in Advent, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. The collect captures and establishes an entire Anglican sensibility about the purpose of Scripture as revelation. Something is made known to us about the high things of God and about our lives with God in the witness of the Scriptures and through the creedal tradition of the Church faithful to that witness. The issue for our day is whether we are willing to hear and receive that Word coming so powerfully to us.
“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Hope. Hope for something more beyond the struggles and limits of human experience. And yet there can be no hope without the theme of judgment awakening us to the reality of the human situation, described so powerfully and accurately in the Gospel. There shall be, it seems, “upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. It seems? Let’s be frank. There is much to disturb and trouble us in our own world and day, in our own church and country, in our own hearts and souls. To deny this would be utter folly.
It would also mean to deny the true desire of our hearts which is always for something more beyond the agony and the pain of the conflicts and divisions within and among ourselves. But where the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed and the Sacraments faithfully celebrated, there and then “know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand”. Such are the signs of the presence of God with us. These lessons are a strong reminder to us of the very nature of the liturgy and its purpose. It is about our being faithfully with the one who comes in judgment and in hope.
Without the judgment, there can be no hope. Why? Because we would have no objective awareness of ourselves and our world and day, because we would have no vision of the glory of our humanity redeemed in the mercies of Christ.
The theme of judgment thundering towards us counters both our pride and our despair, both of which presume to make ourselves the measure of reality. We are more often than not the authors of our own misfortune and certainly we are not the authors of heaven and earth. To be sure, there are the things that befall us – accidents and sufferings caused, too, by the actions of others. But nothing defeats us more than always defining ourselves as victims.
Our age is an age of depression and despair. Depression and despair are themselves forms of pride wherein we cling, often tenaciously, to the experience of futility, anger, hurt and pain in our lives. We allow such things to define us and ultimately, they come to possess us. We are simply too much with ourselves. The Word coming in judgment is a wake-up call to the hope that is greater than ourselves; a wake-up call to the grandeur of God. “Lo, he comes with clouds descending once for favoured sinners slain.”
Today’s advent lessons remind us about God’s Word coming to us, audibly in the Word proclaimed and visibly in the Sacraments celebrated. It is always about a judgment that is not just long ago and far away, a judgment that is not just coming in the future, but a judgment that is ever-present. Such is truth. And hope is always present too.
It means waiting and watching attentively on the Word of God coming to us. The quiet darkness of the Advent season is about our looking to the light of God in the quiet thoughtfulness and prayerfulness of our hearts, not in the mindless and noisy busyness that so often leaves us exhausted and empty. Only if we attend to the quiet of prayer and attentive watchfulness can we enter into the mystery of the Incarnation. Such is Advent, the season and the teaching.
On November 27th, the celebrated English writer, Baroness P.D. James, passed away. Most famous for her detective fiction, she had also tried her hand at writing in the style of Jane Austen in Death Comes to Pemberley, not altogether unsuccessfully. Yet another novel, also outside of her detective novels, was made into a movie, The Children of Men; a movie which, as the culture critic Mark Steyn notes, managed to miss entirely the point of her novel! She was, he quips, the first Baroness to write about barrenness, the spiritual barrenness of our world and day when we are blind and deaf to ideas conveyed on the wings of words. All too true, I am afraid.
One of the last things that she wrote was an essay in a volume commemorating the 350th anniversary in 2012 of the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer. She comments there on the power of words that shape our thinking. “In the beginning was the Word,” she notes and then goes on to say that “the words of our public liturgy, in their beauty, their truth, their numinous power, should be capable of so entering our consciousness that we do not need to search for them, but can release the mind to enter into stillness which is the heart of prayer and worship.” It is a wonderful observation about the language of Scriptural prayer by which we are drawn into the mystery of Christ.
In so many ways, it expresses the inescapably sacramental nature of the proclamation of God’s Word centered so profoundly on the idea of Revelation and how it unites us to God in prayer and worship precisely through what does not “pass away.” Her words echo Cranmer’s great prayer, the prayer for this day.
We can make, perhaps, no better ending to our meditation than returning to our beginning and in praying together the Collect for this day (p. 97):
Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 2, 2014