“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”
It is the great question of the Advent season, itself the great season of questions. It complements another great question, itself a biblical question, too, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?” These questions recall us to God’s great question to us, to Adam in the Garden after the Fall, “Where are you?” with the implied question, ‘and what have you done?’ Somehow the questions about God and man ultimately meet in questions about Jesus.
“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This is the refrain or mantra, we might say, of the Advent season – the season of God’s coming to us. What does it mean that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Jesus takes up this refrain from John the Baptist and makes it his own. In him it has its fullest meaning. But what is that meaning?
For centuries upon centuries upon centuries, the great gospel story for this day has been the triumphal entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem. He comes as a king. His coming is greeted with eager enthusiasm and joyous expectation, it seems. He is hailed as king.
But is this not the gospel of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to the dark pain and agony of Good Friday, the somber silence of Holy Saturday, and then, only then, the paradoxical and overwhelming joy of Easter? To be sure. But “Christmas and Easter are but the evening and the morning of one and the self-same day” as the poet and preacher John Donne puts it. There is an inescapable connection between these two primary centers of Christian contemplation. Like an ellipse, our faith oscillates between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each are implicated in the other. Neither makes any sense without the other.
We know, of course, the further irony of this triumphal entry of a king to his city. The cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to the cries of “Crucify, Crucify!” And only so can we really begin to learn what it means for the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. “My kingdom”, Jesus will say, “is not of this world”. But that is precisely what we so often want to make it. That is precisely our darkness which the Light of Christ coming to us overcomes.
It belonged to the genius of Cranmer in the sixteenth century to add to this gospel reading its continuation with the story of the cleansing of the temple. What is this story? It is the picture of the wrath of God made visible in the anger of Jesus. It is a scene of judgement. Advent, too, is the season of judgement.
Why the wrath of God in the anger of Jesus? This seems so contrary to our expectations for this time of the year, to our demands for sentimental and Christmassy feel-good feelings. But no. Here is a strong reminder about judgement, the judgement of God upon our lives without which our lives have no meaning, no accountability. What is the problem here? Simply our misuse of the things which God has given us. The problem is that we collapse God into our projects and plans. It means that we make our own subjective experience the measure of God and his word and purpose for us. In so doing, we deny the revelation of God to us and, especially, the ultimate mediation of the Word of God to us in Jesus Christ.
Advent is the season of Revelation, the season heralding the motion of God to us, his coming. But to what end? To be collapsed into the world and to become confused with the world? To become the plaything of our whims and wishes, the toy of the devices and desires of our hearts? Surely not.
Existential Christianity makes individual human experience the measure of the truth of God, subordinating Scripture and Creed and, ultimately, God himself to the policies, practices and projects of our day. It denies the transcendence of God and, paradoxically, the purpose of his presence with us. Incarnation and Trinity become merely metaphors for some political or social programme. God is collapsed into the world to serve ends and purposes of our own devisings. The consequence is a kind of fundamentalism of the practical.
This extreme politicization of the Gospel has a further consequence. In taking God and his word captive to ourselves in “the vain imagination of [our] hearts”, existential Christianity denies the redemption of our desires and can only result in the despair which is the denial of desire. Why? Because what we truly desire can only be found in what God wants for us. If we deny the revelation in the mediation of God’s Word and Son to us, then we subject God to our will and not ourselves to his. We are, quite literally, the thieves of God’s grace and beggar ourselves in the attempt. We demand more of our world and day than what it can possibly provide. We forget that we have our end in God.
The three great monotheistic religions of the world – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are, in principle, revealed religions. All three confront, historically and in the contemporary world, the perennial problem of collapsing what is revealed into the politics of power, confusing, we might say, the kingdom of heaven with the kingdoms of this world. If existential Christianity represents the collapse of God into the fundamentalism of the practical, then it has its counterpart, surely, in the fundamentalism of militant Islam which disturbs us all and in the politicization of Judaism in the forms of radical Zionism.
But there is a further fundamentalism, the fundamentalism of secular atheism. The secular state and the secular society of our contemporary world are the fruits and products of western Christianity. When they forget their origins and deny the necessity of the sacred, they become intolerant and overbearing and potentially far more destructive than any other form of fundamentalism. There is nothing comparable in all of human history, after all, to the destructiveness of the totalitarian regimes of secular atheism in the twentieth century. The secular state and secular society become their own God and religion.
This results in the paradox that the secular also contributes to the forms of terrorism and violence. Why? Because as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes in his recent book, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, “fundamentalism emerges when people feel that the world has been allowed to defeat the word.”
Against such evils stand the salutary teachings and strong images of the Advent season. Advent challenges our contemporary world. It calls us to account. It recalls us to the meaning and purpose of our lives as found in the motions of God’s love towards us. That love means judgement, too. Yet, again as Sacks suggests, “the word, given in love, invites its interpretation in love.” Such is Advent; the Word given in love as light.
Advent awakens us to our desire for God. That will mean the cleansing of the temple of our hearts. Ultimately, the wrath of God made visible in the anger of Jesus is the love of his own righteousness which is his good for us. It means coming to terms with the one who comes. The questions of Advent awaken us to judgement, to revelation, and to hope. Advent awakens us to a kind of wonder; in short, to love.
“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”
Fr. David Curry
Advent I, 2015