“The night is far spent”
The far spent night is an arresting and compelling metaphor. It seems to speak to the unease and uncertainty that belongs to the disorder and disarray of all the institutions of our current culture in the sense of ‘endism’ and collapse. Yet it is really a profound reflection on the fallenness of the human condition in all its limitations and follies, its sins and evils, more generally speaking. To put it in another way, it reminds us that it is always the far spent night. It is a wake-up call to the principle of the knowing and being of things which is always coming to us but which we neglect at our peril. The day is always at hand; the everlasting day of the Lord.
I love Advent not so much because of its anticipation of Christmas, so overblown and coloured over with the sentimental moralism of the 19th century, but in its own integrity as a season and a doctrine. Advent reminds me of an essential feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They are all religions of the Word, of the logos. They all draw, in one way or another, upon the intellectual traditions of ancient Greek philosophy which contribute to the distinctive framing of their spiritual understanding.
Advent shows the strong objectivity of God’s Word coming to us as Light and Life. It highlights the primacy of the intellectual and the spiritual which alone redeem the sensual and the material. Advent awakens us to God whose eternal truth and being is always ‘coming towards us’, as it were, in the ways in which we are turned to it. In this sense, Advent, it seems to me, is the counter to the modern “dissociation of intellect and sensibility”, as T.S. Eliot terms it, which belongs to all of our current confusions and contradictions. Such is the falling apart and separation of heart and mind, of body and soul, of our humanity and the natural world, and thus of the brokenness of our institutions. It means a loss of the intellectual and spiritual integration that belongs to the truth of our humanity, a loss of the sense of the co-inherence of all things as proceeding from the co-inherence of the Trinity and the return of all things into unity with God; in short, the co-inherence of our lives with one another as gathered to God.
Advent in its integrity celebrates God’s Word coming in Law and Prophecy through the mediation of the Scriptures; God’s Word coming as Justice and Judgement; God’s Word coming in sacrament and liturgy, in prayer and praise, in acts and deeds of service and sacrifice. These are the motions that define and dignity our humanity. The far spent night is the occasion for our awakening to our lack of awareness about these motions.
The Epistle shows the pageant of God’s Word coming as Law in terms of the Ten Commandments with its compelling ethical demands but wonderfully understood as fulfilled in love, the love of God and the love of neighbour. That is itself a gathering of our humanity into the will of God. Paul here sums up the entire ethical programme of the Jewish Scriptures: it is salvation now but as completed and concentrated in the coming of God’s Word in the flesh, in the figure of Jesus Christ. Such is the meaning of the Christian Advent, the Word made flesh. But it is still and always, the Word, something intellectual and spiritual which engages, shapes and enters into our world and into our lives. The Epistle conveys, and rightly so, a sense of urgency in “cast[ing] off the works of darkness” and “put[ting] on the armour of light” so wonderfully concentrated in the great Advent Collect. Memorize it and pray it daily throughout Advent; note how it gathers together images from the Epistle and the Gospel.
The motions of God’s Word coming to us are seen in the Gospel story of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the story really of Palm Sunday, but read here as signifying the radical nature of Christ’s coming as the humility of God. “Thy King com[ing] unto thee meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass”, a far remove from the vain pomp and glory of the parade of potentates in all times and ages. He is greeted with cries of “Hosanna”, cries of joy and delight in looking towards a saviour. “All the city was moved”, Matthew tells us, “saying, who is this?” It is the first great question of Advent, the season of questions awakening us to truth and grace.
It was the genius of Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century to extend the Gospel reading to include what immediately follows, namely, the rather disturbing scene of the wrath of Christ in cleansing the Temple, “cast[ing] out all them that sold and bought in the Temple; and overthrow[ing] the tables of the money-changers, and the seats of them that sold doves”. It is an arresting picture of the far spent night of our misuse of the things of God. We turn ourselves and the things of God into commodities, things to be bought and sold, manipulated and used by us. This scene complements Mary’s Magnificat: “he hath showed strength with his arm; / He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts./ He hath put down the mighty from their seat,/ and hath exalted the humble and meek./ He hath filled the hungry with good things;/ and the rich he hath sent empty away.” For such is the real Advent of God.
Thus the Gospel complements the far spent night of the Epistle reading. It awakens us to the darkness of our world and our hearts. It reminds us of the need for what comes from God to us in contrast to the disorders of ourselves having “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” (BCP, p. 4 & 19). It is an awakening to the truth of God as distinct from the self-righteous and self-serving dictates of our technocratic world which treat everyone else as things to be manipulated and controlled and to what end? For ourselves in the illusions of power and control.
We read the Ten Commandments this morning. They are not a list, not a series of suggestions, but a complete system of ethical thought, integrated and whole. They signal the majesty of God’s Word coming to us in Law, the Law which seeks the good of our humanity as grounded in God’s Word and Will. They are not superseded by the coming of Christ but fulfilled and realized in the deeper meaning of the Advent of God’s Word coming to us. That deeper meaning is love, God’s Word as love. Once we begin to grasp that idea then suddenly all of the sober and thundering words of the Advent Gospels take on a new meaning and perhaps, just perhaps, we begin to understand exactly what the great Advent Carol, the Veni Emmanuel proclaims. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel”. Advent is about our rejoicing in the illuminating and enlightening motions of God’s Word coming to us but only if we recognise and feel that “the night is far spent, the day is at hand”.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 1, 2022