Year: 2022

“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.

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“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

For centuries upon centuries the Gospel read on this Sunday, known by the intriguing name of The Sunday Next Before Advent, was from ‘the Bread of Life discourse’ in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is the Johannine account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness with its distinctive sacramental emphasis. It is familiar to you as the Gospel read on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. In 1959, the revisors of the Canadian Prayer Book changed the reading to what you heard this morning about the disciples of John coming to Jesus and Jesus turning to them and asking them, “what do you seek?” and inviting them to “come and see” and to “follow”.

Both are wonderful readings for this transitional Sunday in the ordered pattern of the Church year. We have come to an end and so to a beginning, a beginning again of the long pageant of redemption in the story of Christ’s Advent and its unfolding through the Incarnation, the Epiphany, his Passion and Death, Resurrection and Ascension, the sending of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, and the culmination of that whole story in the Feast of the Holy and Blessed Trinity. In a way, it is nothing less than running through the Creed, through what we might call the substantial and doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. That in turn becomes the basis for the second half of the Church Year by way of the Trinity season which concerns how the Creed runs through us and incorporates us more fully into the life of God revealed in Christ. In short, there are two movements: one, the motion of justifying grace in the story of Christ’s life, the other, the motions of sanctifying grace in us. This Sunday marks the juxtaposition of both moments.

There is another movement as well in the festivals of the Saints which are about the glorifying righteousness of God realised in the lives of the Saints. They are those who in one way or another have lost their wills and found them again in Christ; his grace is the perfection of their humanity. That pageant of glorifying grace punctuates the other two movements and reaches its climax in the great November feast of All Saints’. Like the harvest, it is about a gathering together of all things into unity, a unity in which we find the real truth and dignity of the diversity of our humanity and of creation itself.

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