Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 2
“My words shall not pass away”
Today’s strong and rather disturbing words seem to complement the apocalyptic nature of our current times. “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring”. They seem to speak to our fears and worries, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, to our anxieties on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. How, we might ask, is this comforting? How is this good news if even “the powers of heaven shall be shaken”? Such things must surely unsettle us. They seem to convey the opposite of hyggelig, the Danish word for coziness and material comfort, the cuddle and huddle of the sentimental and the sensual that seems to define our age.
There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present. Yet these disturbing warnings about judgement are intended to provide us with patience and comfort and, even more, with hope. Such is the burden of Cranmer’s Collect which derives from the Epistle and from Jesus’s claim in the Gospel that “my words shall not pass away”.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all religions of the Word. They are all logos-centric. They are all quite explicit about the primacy of the Word of God as revealed to our humanity. They are all revealed religions which place a high value on the Word of God as mediated to us through written texts, through Scripture, whether the Scriptures are the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures, comprising the Torah or Law, the Prophets and the Writings for Jews, or the Arabic Quran for Muslims, the recitation of Allah’s will by the Angel Gabriel (Jibril) to Mohammed, or the Scriptures for Christians which embrace the Old Testament (largely written in Hebrew) and the New Testament written in Greek. Scripture means that which is written. What is revealed is for thought, for serious philosophical reflection.
“Whatsoever things were written aforetime”, St. Paul states, “were written for our learning.” He is referring to the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures and not what will come to be the New Testament, the Christian Scriptures, the greatest number of which will paradoxically come from him. He states an important principle about revealed religion. It is something written down for our learning. This grants a priority to reading, especially reading out loud such as in our liturgy because God, as Cranmer puts it, “has caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning”.
The Bible is itself a library of books, literally biblia, understood as God’s Word written. There is something to be learned through books. Hence the significance of Jesus’ great question “how readest thou?” complemented by Paul’s great question, “what saith the Scripture?” Cranmer’s answer in the Collect encapsulates an entire approach to reading as grounded on the reading of the Bible: “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest”, a phrase which Sir Francis Bacon extends to learning in general in his celebrated essay, “Of Studies”.
Think about these terms. Not skim, scan, surf, browse, but “read, mark”, meaning take note, and “learn”. What does learn mean? It means to make what you have read and heard your own and in the most direct and intimate way imaginable, namely “inwardly digest”, take into yourself. Such terms counter the metaphors of our times which are all about things on the surface – skimming, scanning, surfing, browsing. Ours is an age of shallow reading. Today’s strong words point to how we are shaped by the Word. It is not outside us. It is in us. We are to be in-worded, even as we await the holy birth of the Word incarnate.
This speaks to the crisis of our age about reading and learning. The digital world makes many things accessible to us, yet, in many ways, it also hides great dangers. The greatest danger is the loss of understanding, a flattening of the intellectrather than a deepening of our souls. There is an analogy between the tactility of the book, the Bible, and the embodiment of the Word and Son of God, the Word made flesh, that stands in stark contrast to the illusions, images and the disembodied aspects of cyberspace. The digital world is part of the transmission of knowledge, to be sure, but is incapable of superseding the book culture without great loss. Dependent upon the book culture, it would be a tragic irony if it were to succeed in destroying it. The “digital deluge”, as Richard Overden, the Librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, calls it, risks being part of “the deliberate destruction of knowledge” (Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge, 2020).
The challenge lies in being able to negotiate between the cultures of the written word, and the digital culture with its constant barrage of images, constantly in flux, unstable, elusive and transient. Where is the Word when the power goes out? What is at issue is the quality of our reading. What is at stake is our understanding and our being.
Inwardly digesting is a powerful scriptural image. The Law, for instance, is not just before us on tablets of stone but is meant to be inscribed in us. Such is the interest of the Psalms in their constant meditation upon God’s word, such as we have seen in Psalm 119, and by the prophets, such as Ezekiel, who extends the image of the Law inscribed upon our hearts to the idea of eating the scroll of the Torah, thus inwardly digesting the Law. These are powerful images about deep reading, something which a host of contemporary writers, such as Maryanne Wolf in her book ‘Reader, Come Home’, constantly emphasize.
Our churches are places where the Word of God is not only proclaimed and celebrated but where it is meditated upon and thought about prayerfully. They are not emotional entertainment centers providing some sort of orgasmic high for the experience-deprived of our spiritually bankrupt age. Thus these readings challenge everything in our age, including our penchant for wanting to use God’s Word for political and social ends and purposes. Scripture in its fullness bids us live what it teaches. It is “a living word” but the measure of that Word and its living force is not simply to be found in this or that agenda and plan. Those are exactly the things which pass away while “my words,” as Jesus says, “shall not pass away”. They have what the poet Margaret Avison calls the quality of “foreverness” (‘Pilgrim’).
The Word which comes to us comes from God and is eternal. It stands in stark contrast to the passing away of all of the projects of our hearts and minds, all our projects, that is to say, that are not rooted and grounded in the eternal Word. It remains our lifelong project to think deeply and carefully about ourselves in relation to that Word. It means to discern the things of eternal worth in and through the things that are constantly passing away. Such are the qualities of “real words”, as Avison suggests, “the ones Your mouth-parts, throat and breath weigh in with meanings soundlessly deep forever” (Listening (for Grandma).
To be looking for those things is the antidote to all our fears and anxieties. It requires that we “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”. Only so can we find inner peace, a deeper joy and everlasting hope even in the midst of the uncertainties and fears of our world and day. God’s Word coming to us awakens us to “meanings soundlessly deep forever,” in words read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, words that shall not pass away.
“My words shall not pass away”
Fr. David Curry
The Second Sunday in Advent
December 6th, 2020 (re. 09)