Day: November 28, 2021

“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, and a light unto my path”

Advent signals the motion of God’s Word and Son coming to us. It is Revelation, something made known to us which is not simply a product of human reason but which is nonetheless given for thought and life. On the First Sunday of Advent we encounter the interplay of strong negatives and positives, the strong negatives and positives of God’s Word as Law and Light, the positive in the negative and the negative in the positive.

The Collect concentrates this for us in the complementary actions of “casting off” and “putting on”, echoing explicitly the Epistle reading from St. Paul, a movement from the ‘negatives’ of the Law to the “put[ting] on the armour of light”. Such are the positives of “walk[ing] honestly as in the day”, walking in the light of the Law understood in its fullness in Christ. “Put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ” is about us in Christ and Christ in us, the alpha and omega of our lives. This, in turn, is complemented by the Gospel but in the reverse order: going from the positives of Christ’s joyous  and triumphant entry into Jerusalem to the negatives of his “cast[ing] out all them that sold and bought in the temple; and over[throwing] the tables of the money-changers”. Love here appears as the wrath of Christ.

Such images belong to the dialectical nature of Revelation where the negatives are equally positive and vice-versa. What is revealed comes to us as light into the darkness of the world of human sin not simply as condemnation but as illumination and, as such, restoration; in short, as both negative and positive. Advent awakens us to the idea of embracing the coming of the light of God which does not extinguish and annihilate human reason and will but seeks their perfection in truth in its fullness. The Ten Commandments have as their end and purpose the charity or love which establishes friendship between one another in the human community and with God.

Aquinas, following Paul, argues that “the whole law is comprised in this one commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, as expressing the end of all commandments: because love of one’s neighbour includes love of God, when we love our neighbour for God’s sake”. This essentially captures “the summary of the Law”, on the one hand, and recognizes the priority of the ground of each of the Ten Commandments in the first commandment, “Thou shalt have none other gods but me”, on the other hand. “For the love of God”, Aquinas says,  “is the reason for the love of neighbour. Hence the precepts ordaining man to God take precedence over the others” (ST. I-II, 100). There is a complete order of thought to the Ten Commandments; yet in a way they are an explication of the radical meaning of the first commandment about God. They have their unity in the God who reveals himself to Moses out of the burning bush not just in terms of tribal, cultural, ethnic and religious identities, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but as the universal principle of all reality, I AM WHO I AM.

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