by CCW | 28 November 2021 08:00
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.
The Ten Commandments mark at once the climax of the Exodus, the journey of the soul to God, we might say, and follow logically upon this iconic symbol of Revelation in the story of the burning bush. The movement is from God himself to God’s will for our humanity expressed in its most complete and concise form in the Ten Commandments, the principle upon which all other ‘laws and regulations’ depend and to which they return and are governed. But they are equally a form of natural law.
We have, I think, a largely mistaken understanding of the concept of Law, frequently confusing law and regulation. Rules and regulations bind, limit, and constrain our actions. They are inherently arbitrary and alterable. They are really nothing more than an application of the much thicker concept of law to the changing circumstances of the world as determined by the authorities of our day. Law, by contrast, is freedom. To put in Isaiah Berlin’s trenchant phrase, there is a freedom from and a freedom to, a negative and a positive freedom, as it were. That is, I think, understood by Paul in his listing of the commandments pertaining to our relations with our neighbour. He presupposes the radical nature of the Law as a positive freedom emphasizing that the Law is good and that it has its meaning and fulfillment in love. “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the Law”. Thus the seeming negativity of the Law as a sequence of “Thou shalt nots” reveals a deeper positivity grounded in God himself. The Ten Commandments begin with God in his self-revelation and signal emphatically that they are about liberation. “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”. “I am the Lord thy God” is really a circumlocution for “I am the ‘I AM WHO I AM’”. The point is that the Law is freedom in the truest sense.
The wonder of Advent is found in this movement of God towards us which is nothing less than the movement of truth. Advent seeks to awaken us to the freeing power of God’s Word coming as Law and Light which is equally Grace and Salvation.
The idea of love as the fulfilling of the Law is the deeper meaning of the Gospel, a reading which Cranmer extended by including the story of Christ’s cleansing of the Temple which follows in Matthew’s Gospel immediately upon his triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Together they highlight the deeper meaning of Advent as the coming of God as Light into the darkness of the world. Christ’s triumphant coming into Jerusalem marks what becomes the Palm Sunday beginning of his Passion. The movement again is from the positive to the negative and then its reverse. Out of the Passion and Death of Christ comes Resurrection and Life. Advent and Christmas complement Lent and Easter; they are united in God in the movement of Revelation and in our thinking upon what we are given to know.
Such is the greater unity of the pattern of readings and our liturgical participation in them through this interplay of distinct moments, this dance of the negative and the positive, each in the other. What is revealed in the Law is equally a form of natural law or human reason. The commandments do not destroy our reasoning but belong to its perfection and clarity. To know God as one is to know the many and the manifold nature of things as contained in a principle, the One, the Good, Being, Truth, the intellectual principle which holds things together in truth, the sacred truths of philosophy, as it were. What is revealed is for thought.
“Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times” is the last work of the noted public intellectual, the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks. It was published in 2020, the year he died. The work is a kind of wonderful synthesis and summing up of his life’s work in the area of ethical philosophy. He notes that more than fifty years ago when he was a student at Oxford, ethical philosophy was in a perilous state. Ethics was generally dismissed as something simply subjective or merely a form of cultural relativism, assumptions that are still very much with us in the confusions of our times in such things as ‘your truth’ versus ‘my truth’ at the expense of truth itself. Sacks noted that thoughtful atheists and theists at that time found such ideas profoundly unsatisfactory and undertook the task of thinking about moral philosophy in a serious and intellectual way in order to reclaim the positive and essential necessity of ethics. For Sacks that meant bringing into the ethical discourse the powerful contributions belonging to the philosophical and theological thinking of the religious cultures of the world.
We are caught between the competing tyrannies of the self or the individual in the assertion of their rights and the tyrannies of the state in its dictates and demands. Paradoxically both assume each other. The rights’ claims of the individual require the strong arm of the state for their enforcement even as those rights are predicated upon the assumption of the radical autonomy of the individual. How to negotiate between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ is Sack’s interest. He rightly notes that “we have no right to freedom if exercising that right harms the freedom of others.” Bringing the theological traditions of ethical philosophy into the discourse thickens and deepens our thinking precisely about our duties and obligations towards ourselves and others by grounding them in God. This counters the false opposition in contemporary culture between fideism and rationalism, both equally empty and incomplete. What is needed is the recovery of a sense of the interplay and engagement between complementary forms of knowing: what is revealed for thought and what can be known through the activities of human reason itself. Such things belong to the project of Advent and to the real business of the Church.
Though referring explicitly to the second tablet of the Law what is implicit are the commandments about our duties to God without which our duties to neighbour are incomplete. In the Christian understanding both find their fulfillment in Christ. In him, the pageant of God’s Word crystallizes the deeper meaning of God’s Word as Law and brings us to the wonder of the Word made flesh. Let us then “cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light”, acknowledging the ancient insight of the Psalmist in Psalm 119 where every verse states the Law as a positive source of delight. The Law is our freedom and delight. Such is the radical meaning of God’s Word coming to us in the pageant of Advent.
Fr. David Curry
Advent I, 2021
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