KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 December
And all the city was stirred, saying, Who is this?
Who is this who comes? Advent is about our awakening to Truth, at once ever present and yet ever coming towards us. As such it belongs to the philosophical insight that truth is primary and prior to us and to all our intellectual endeavours. Truth belongs to the Absolute Good which is God. It is ever coming towards us, we might say, in terms of our awareness (or lack thereof). It is high time to be awakened out of sleep, Paul tells us. Wachet auf, as Bach’s cantata so powerfully reminds us.
The readings in Chapel this week serve to prepare the School for the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us in the remarkable service of Nine Lessons and Carols. We may not be able to have congregational singing but we can be part of the great pageant of God’s Word coming to us and awakening us to what is greater than ourselves. Perhaps that is the great lesson for our day and the counter to all of the narcissisms and self-obsessions that surround us.
The reading from Matthew about Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem is not only read on Palm Sunday but on the First Sunday in Advent and has been for centuries upon centuries. It is a strong reminder to us about the serious nature of God’s turning to us and our turning to God. It signals at once a sense of joy and wonder but as well a sense of judgment. In short, we are being called to account about matters intellectual and ethical. In the 16th century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer extended the reading to include what immediately follows in Matthew’s account, namely, the disturbing story of Christ’s anger in his cleansing of the temple of “all them that bought and sold therein”, a misuse of the sacred, of the things of God. We read as well from Psalm 85 which captures the twofold emphasis in the Gospel reading: the idea of God turning us and of his anger ceasing from us, on the one hand, and the idea of God turning us again and quickening or enlivening us so that “thy people may rejoice in thee”.
The anger of God? What does that mean? As the exegetical traditions understood, this is simply about how God speaks to us in human ways for the sake of our understanding. For us anger is usually a destructive and dangerous emotion though there is room for the phenomenon of righteous anger, such as in Juvenalian satire used by Voltaire to awaken us to the various forms of injustice in our world and day which cannot be ignored. In a deeper sense, God’s anger or wrath is the love of his own truth and righteousness against all that denies it.