Month: December 2023

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope”

There are things which, perhaps, we would rather not think about that belong to the wisdom of the Advent season. What are those things? They are things like death, judgment, heaven and hell, the proverbial four last things or eschatology which for centuries were served up as the basic preaching fare during the Advent season. They are things which we would rather ignore or forget. We do so at our peril because such things really belong to hope, the great advent teaching of the Second Sunday in Advent.

Scripture speaks to Scripture, opening out the Word to us that carries hope in its breath. The Holy Scriptures are “written for our learning,” St. Paul exclaims, and Archbishop Cranmer prays the same in the wonderful Collect that adorns this day and this week, a Collect that embodies a whole attitude of mind and approach to the Scriptures. It encapsulates a way of understanding the Scriptures. They are writings that teach us “that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Comfort here is not simply hygge suggesting a quality of coziness and material comfort making us hyggelig. Comfort here is much stronger and deeper; it relates entirely to our life with God in his word coming to us that challenges us and redeems us from ourselves.

Hope is one of the great lessons of the Scriptures. Why? Because hope is precisely something which is not dependent upon us. The hope to which the Scriptures awaken us is real hope, the hope that has realized the utter limitations of human endeavour, the hope that has faced the empty abyss of ourselves and the vanity of our actions, the hope that has considered the reality of sin and death. Looking into the things of judgment and condemnation, hope also looks up to God and to the coming of God into our midst.

The coming is hope itself. We look for what we do not see. We wait for it. In the coming of Christ we look for what we do not see in ourselves but see in him, namely, the redemption of our wounded and weary humanity. But it takes the Word proclaimed and celebrated to awaken us and to sustain us in the hope of the Gospel and in the hope that we might begin to see this even in ourselves.

For what do we hope? Simply for the accomplishing of the good will and purpose of God in our lives. Big deal, you might be thinking. What will be will be. Que sera, sera. Yes, but why assume that that will be good? Why not assume misery and suffering? Plenty of that to go around, after all. Such an attitude is fatalistic. It leaves the individual completely and conveniently out of the equation – what will be will be whether I act or don’t act, whether I do something or nothing. That is sheer hopelessness. Fatalism is ultimately our despair of anything good; it is, really, a denial of hope. The denial of hope is our despair of God and his love. We consign ourselves to victimhood. It belongs to the culture of depression and dependency; the culture of despair. It is ultimately anti-human and negates the truth of our humanity as found in God.

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“Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart”

We will hear these words in the mystery of Christmas. What things does Mary keep and ponder in her heart? All the things that are said about the child Christ. By extension we, too, are bidden to ponder all the things that belong to the mystery of Christ. Such is part of the meaning of tonight’s commemoration. We can’t think about Christ apart from Mary. She is an essential part of the mystery and meaning of the Incarnation.

Pondus meum amor meus. My love is my weight. A powerful phrase from Augustine, it has shaped the patristic, medieval, and reformation churches’ understanding of human redemption. Augustine’s image captures a significant theological theme which speaks to a culture which has abandoned God and finds itself adrift and isolated. Such is our wilderness.

Mary in Advent is Mary in Holy Waiting. What defines Mary is her waiting upon the will of God. Far from a kind of passive acquiescence, Mary’s waiting is an holy activity, a kind of attentiveness to the pageant of God’s Word revealed in the Law and the Prophets and now, on Angel’s wings, it seems, opening us out to the wonder and the marvel of God’s coming to us through her. To what extent are we in her? For Mary, in Irenaeus’ poignant and potent phrase is the pure womb which gives birth to that purity which Christ himself has made pure: “that pure one opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.”

It is impossible to think of Mary apart from Christ; she is quietly and patiently with us in our meditations and thoughts. For the Church in prayer is essentially Marian. Mary is an inescapable feature of the landscape of Advent. She plays a critical and crucial role in our understanding of Christ’s coming to us as Emmanuel, God with us. Through Mary we begin to discover how our humanity is totally and inescapably bound up with the will of God towards us; in short, his advent.

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