What seek ye?
What do we really and truly desire? Do we know what is to be rightly and properly wanted for our good and the good of others? Advent is the season of questions that open us out to what God seeks for us which is always good. The question for us is whether we will be teachable. To be a disciple, after all, is to be a learner. At issue is a respect for learning.
The Advent Pageant of Lessons and Carols is the great parade of God’s Word coming to us illumining the darkness of our hearts and our world. Only in confronting our darkness, both our sins and follies as well as the limitations of our thinking and doing, can we begin to discover what God seeks for us which is the good and the dignity of our humanity. The motion of God’s Word coming to us in the stirring words of the great lessons of the Advent Pageant is about the presence of God’s truth calling us to account. It is at once judgment and mercy.
It is all in the questions. “Where art thou?” and “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” are the great questions which God asks as we heard in the first lesson from Genesis. These are questions which belong to the story of the Fall, to the story of our separation from God and the world and from one another, the story of the form of our awakening to self-consciousness. Then through the recollection of the Abrahamic covenant through which all nations and “all peoples of the earth shall be blessed,” through the prophecy of Micah about “little Bethlehem,” through the prophetic insight of Isaiah about “the Prince of Peace” and about a renewed paradise where “the wolf lies down with the lamb” rather than eating the lamb, through the Annunciation and the story of Christ’s birth, and finally through the great Christmas Gospel of “the Word made flesh”, we are being offered another way of thinking about life than the despairing dog-eat-dog world of domination and bullying, of power without truth.
The questions of Mary, “troubled at the saying” and wondering in her mind “what manner of salutation this should be” and “how shall this be since I know not a man?” emphasize that Advent is anything but mindless. It offers a profound critique of the dangerous and destructive forms of instrumental reason which have largely defined modernity. The counter is found in the encounter with God. Advent is about God’s deep and profound engagement with our humanity. We are in the presence of God as truth through the coming of the Word.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, Proverbs (1.7) reminds us. It may seem a troubling concept. Yet it belongs to the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding and has its parallels in other religions and philosophies. It complements completely, it seems to me, Aristotle’s observation that “philosophy begins with wonder”. The fear of the Lord is about our awe and wonder at the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of God. It is about our being awakened to something more than the destructive capacities of our mechanical and instrumental forms of reason. Some in our contemporary world, such as Simon Critchley, have argued that philosophy begins with disappointment but, perhaps, that too can be redeemed and turned to wonder when we discover that our disappointments are altogether about us and the nihilisms which we have chosen in ignoring or dismissing the idea of God and his truth for us and our lives.
We live in apocalyptic times. The secularists are the most vocal about the fears and anxieties of our contemporary world for which there is no hope and no solution. There is the fear of nuclear holocaust after decades of arrogant indifference to the ambitions of North Korea. There is the fear of catastrophic climate changes that will endanger the lives of millions through famine and flood. There is the constant and ugly spectacle of genocide and war as well as an endless litany of acts of terrorism. The four horseman of the Apocalypse ride through our imaginations in very real ways.
There are some who optimistically but naively trust in technology to save us at the same time as denying our humanity and human personality. In Yuval Noah Harari’s view, we are merely organic algorithms. There is no you. You are just an illusion. Nihilism redux.
In the face of this secular apocalyptic, the sense of a catastrophic end to human and natural life, we might recall the age-old patterns of religious and philosophical reflection on eschatology, the doctrine of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell. Such reflections are the counter to a sense of despair and hopelessness precisely because they awaken us not only to an awareness of the darkness of human reason but to the greater light of God’s redeeming truth. They provide a challenge and a critique of human reason. They call us to an understanding of our humanity in the light of God’s truth and word. They call us to intellection and to wisdom.
This year, 2017, marks the 140th anniversary of Hensley Memorial Chapel, the second oldest building on the campus. It is a place which contributes to the culture of learning which properly belongs to a school. The Advent Service of Lessons and Carols, instituted in 1918 just after the devastations of the First World War, addresses a world of utter desolation by a solemn pageant of Word and Song conveying hope and peace and joy and love.
The last chapels of the Michaelmas term presented the first dialogue and direct speech of Jesus in John’s Gospel. As with God in Genesis, the first form of direct speech by Jesus is his question to the disciples of John who are now following Jesus whom John had pointed out as “the lamb of God.” As John tells us, “Jesus turned.” In that motion we have the essence of the Advent. God turns to us to turn us to him. It leads to a dialogue of question and response. “What seek ye?” Jesus asks, only to go on to invite them to “come and see.” It is really all about our turning to the truth because God in his Word and Truth has turned to us. We are awakened to the discovery of who we are in the sight of God and to the mystery of God’s being with us. In the Christian understanding, that is the mystery of Christmas, the mystery of the Word made flesh. Christmas bestows a certain dignity upon our humanity, the counter to our fears and despair. And that is a great blessing.
Blessings to all in the Advent and Christmas season.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy