“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs (1.7) reminds us. It is a recurring feature of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding. At first glance, it may seem a troubling phrase and yet it complements Aristotle’s idea that philosophy begins with wonder. The fear of the Lord is really our awe and wonder at the majesty and truth of God, the God, to be sure, who as Truth calls us to account. Others in our contemporary world, such as Simon Critchley, have argued that philosophy begins with disappointment but, perhaps, such a view can be redeemed and turned to wonder if we realize that our disappointments have entirely to do with our own nihilisms and the ways in which we close ourselves off from God and from one another. Advent, in that sense, should be a welcome wake-up call for our souls, for our churches, and even for our world.
We live in apocalyptic times, times of fears and anxieties about impending doom. There is the fear of nuclear holocaust as the result of decades of arrogant indifference to the ambitions of North Korea. There is the fear of catastrophic changes to the climate and the environment resulting in the deaths of millions through famine and flood. There are the on-going spectacles of genocide and war and the recurring acts of terrorism throughout our world and day. The doomsday preachers are the secularists; even the optimists among them can only naively advocate the notion that technology, especially AI, artificial intelligence, might save us even as, at the same time, they deny any reality to our humanity and to human personality. In Yuval Noah Harari’s view we are only organic algorithms. There is no you. That, too, is a feature of the secular apocalyptic in its essential nihilism. There is really only despair; a kind of emptiness. The night is more than far spent. It’s gone and we’re done for.
In complete contrast to these secular forms of Apocalypticism, the sense of the catastrophic ending of all life, human and natural, there is the long, long tradition of reflection on the last things, known as eschatology, in our religious traditions. Advent is apocalyptic.
There is, for instance, the Advent tradition of meditating of the four last things. The four last things are death, judgment, heaven and hell. They are not ignored but meditated upon prayerfully and thoughtfully. We might ask how that is possible and how that is positive. The four horsemen of John’s Apocalypse gallop across the landscape of our imaginations for our good. One of the great Advent hymns, though one which is rarely sung and heard in our modern times, is the Dies Irae. “O day of Wrath and doom impending,/ David’s word with Sibyl’s blending,/ Heaven and earth in ashes ending.” A 19th century translation of this 13th century hymn is found at Hymn # 70. All nineteen verses (which is probably why it is rarely sung) provide a powerful and thoughtful meditation on the human condition as seen in the light of God’s Revelation.
That is what makes all the difference. Advent is about our openness to the things of God. It is the season of teaching, the season of the light of God coming to a world of darkness. Such is truth and mercy. Thus Paul in Romans recalls us to the necessity of the Law and to its fulfillment in love that requires us to awaken out of sleep. “The night is far spent,” he says, but “the day is at hand,” the day of the Lord. Instead of complacency and indifference or fear and despair, we are awakened to truth and virtue; in short, to our life in Christ. There is hope in the face of our fears and anxieties, in the face of our darkness and despair.
“Live every day as if it were your last; study as if you are to live forever,” a 14th century tutor at Oxford advised. It, too, is an ancient theme: vita brevis, ars longa. Life is short; learning is forever. Advent reminds us of the constant coming of God as truth. That is the real nature of the apocalyptic sensibilities of the Advent season. It takes truth seriously, recognizing the failings and short-comings of our humanity, on the one hand, but recalling us to the truth and goodness of God, on the other hand. Both speak to the importance of repentance. That is about our turning back to the God from whom we have turned away.
That motion of return has entirely to do with the wonder of God’s turning to us in law and love, in wrath and mercy. That is what is set before us in the Scripture readings for this day both in the Epistle and Gospel but also in the gradual psalm, Psalm 85, itself one of the great psalms of the Advent. In that psalm we ask God to turn us even as we beseech him to turn away of his wrath from us.
What does that mean? Wrath – extreme anger – is such a negative and destructive concept. To be sure. And yet saeva indignatio, fierce indignation, can be a powerful force for the good. Jonathan Swift’s great work of Juvenalian satire, satire which is defined by fierce indignation, is called, ironically, A Modest Proposal. A form of literary ‘shock and awe’, the essay gets our attention about a serious problem, a problem about a kind of injustice. The problem is child poverty in eighteenth century Ireland. Swift is angry, full of wrath, we might say, about this problem, a problem which is being completely ignored by the complacency and indifference of the ruling powers of the day. They, of course, are benefitting from the miseries of others. Such is the age old problem of exploitation and imperialism. In this case, the English, it seems, are eating up the Irish.
Swift knows that our attempts to fix problems often make things worse but what he is really getting at is our indifference to human suffering, to injustice and wrong, as arising out of our own immediate self-interest and complacency. His fierce indignation seeks to awaken in us a similar emotion, the spirit of serious anger, fierce indignation. His modest proposal is anything but modest; he suggests in a sustained and detailed economic business plan the outrageous idea of eating the year-old babies of the Irish poor – boiled baby, stewed baby, baby in a ragout! The whole argument illustrates exactly the problem of exploitation where we turn one another into things to be consumed; eating one another up is about using and abusing our humanity.
The satire, sustained and vigorous in its style and argument, calls our attention to human suffering and injustice. While not providing any real or practical solution, it confronts us with a serious problem which we cannot simply ignore. That is its brilliance. It gets our attention.
What, then, about God’s wrath, God’s fierce indignation? How are we to understand that? Is God moved by the same emotions as us? Well no. Scripture often speaks of God in terms of human emotions in order to get our attention about the problem of ourselves. In terms of God, his wrath is best understood as the love of His own righteousness and truth out of which love he seeks to awaken us to the darkness of our sin and evil. But that requires, in turn, the deeper recognition of God’s absolute truth and mercy. To know ourselves as sinners is to know the love and the truth of God.
In the Gospel for The First Sunday of Advent, we not only have the story of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, here understood as the coming of Christ as God’s Word and Son, but as well the troubling and yet necessary story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple. He “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves.” It is, we might say, a scene of the wrath of Christ. But it gets our attention, I think, and points out a fundamental problem about ourselves, our interests and preoccupations.
It has entirely to do with our misuse of the good things of God’s creation, our misuse of one another and of the things which God provides. We are the problem especially when we forget or deny the truth of God by our obsessions about our material self-interests and our complacency and indifference to one another. Advent is about nothing more and nothing less than the pageant of God’s Word as truth and light confronting our darkness and evil including our complacency and indifference. The Advent message is clear. Left to “the devices and desires of our own hearts” we are deadly and destructive. Our hope is found entirely in the motions of God’s Word and truth coming to us. Our awareness of our own darkness moves us to embrace the light of God’s Word. We are awakened to “the fear of the Lord,” to awe and wonder in God. This is “the beginning of wisdom” and our end in wisdom.
Advent is the pageant of God’s Word coming to us in mente, in mind, in carne, in the flesh of Christ, and in judicio, in judgment. The judgement is not arbitrary and vengeful; the judgement is simply God’s truth. Our being awakened to the presence of his truth is not simply wrath but mercy. “The night is far spent” but “the day is at hand.” Rejoice and be glad in it!
“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2017