“Remember then what you received and heard; keep that and repent”
I am tempted to call this sermon, ‘Why we need hell’. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us, nor is it meant to scare us into heaven, as it were, in contrast to the usual and depressing parade of human miseries. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of the truth of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, hell is about getting exactly what you want which is not the same thing as what you think it is. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept the word” and thus, have not repented, as the letter to the Church in Sardis in Revelation puts it. They have, Dante suggests, “abandoned all hope.” The key word is abandoned; it is a matter of our will and our reason.
Our text from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which we read in the Evening Offices from the week of the Sunday Next Before Advent through the following three weeks of Advent, and which is from this morning’s second lesson at Matins, complements the eucharistic readings and echoes Matthew’s Apocalypse, his wake-call to what abides and ever is. “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” We find our hope and joy in that ever-abiding and eternal word of God paradoxically in the experience of the passing away of all things finite considered in themselves. Such finite realities are not nothing: they have their truth and meaning in the abiding and eternal word of God whose “words shall not pass away.”
It is not just about the catastrophes and impending senses of endism whether in the various forms of eco-apocalyptism or global social, economic, political, and psychological distresses – all wonderfully contracted in Matthew’s “distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear.” This is an aspect of our world, a world of fears, of troubles and tribulations rather fully comprehended and catalogued in the Litany. But whether in good times or bad, we are bidden to “look up and lift up our heads for our redemption draweth nigh”. That is of a different nature and order than our immediate and worldly idolatries of the practical and the technological, ourselves in our presumptions and now in our fears. Rather it is about looking to God in the motions of his Word towards us.
That Word is, inescapably, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word that convinces our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, inescapably, found wanting. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitations, something more is opened out to us that is beyond ourselves and our doings.
That something more is conveyed in the pageant of Scripture. Advent reminds us of the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming, as we have said, is threefold: a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, present and future, because it is now and always; and a coming in mente, in our souls to shape and order our desires. And these three ‘comings’ are all comings of God in his Word which is “written for our learning”.
The word-centered nature of the Christian Faith challenges the visual-fixated character of contemporary culture. We are constantly bombarded by an array of images overwhelming in the allure of their sensual immediacy. They are the stuff of the moment, the illusions of our wants and desires, sensual and immediate. They offer no hope. In a way, they are hell. They are about what we think we want. Yet in thinking about them we discover their superficiality, their insubstantiality, their futility. If the images of the things of passing worth are at best themselves but mere shadows, then how much more of passing worth are the pictures of the pictures of such things?
The Word of God comes to redeem both ourselves and the images themselves; in short, the Word of God comes in judgment to awaken us to truth. In that awakening to truth we find mercy and hope. Why? Precisely because the Word is what comes to us and not what comes from us. This is the great insight of the biblical witness. In the coming of the Word in Law and Prophecy, in story and song, we are awakened to the absolute and objective goodness of God in the eternal Word and Son of the Father.
Hope is about our orientation and longing for what comes from God to us. That is always more than what we can desire or deserve. Hell is about being left to ourselves. The Word proclaimed points to the ‘something more’ of God’s grace. There is hope precisely at the point where we have despaired of the things of this world because only then are we open to the greater reality of God and his will for us. There is redemption through hope. It changes how we deal with everything in the present of our lives. Hope is precisely not-of-this-world. Our worldly hopes are hopeless in comparison with the greater hope of the Gospel. It alone proclaims the redemption of our desires as brought before the objective measure of God’s Word in the Scriptures, written and proclaimed. It is a judgment upon our lives considered in themselves.
To discover the hell of our own desires is to be awakened to the hope of heaven. It means discovering what God wants for us. To want what he wants is the redemption of our desires. The pageant of the Scriptures is judgment upon the confusion of our souls and the wickednesses of our lives and world. Only so is there hope, the hope that is always more and never less than what we either deserve or desire.
Thus, the Gospel Apocalypse is complemented not only by the lesson from Revelation but also by the lesson from Isaiah about the seven-fold gifts of the Spirit and the vision of creation restored to the harmony of Paradise where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb for “they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.” What passes away is gathered into the unity of God.
This way of thinking has its parallel in the literature of Alistair MacLeod who reflects deeply on the passing away of traditional ways of life, especially in our Maritime context, and yet contemplates what is passed on and abides through that passing away; something substantial and meaningful about human identity and life, something universal that transcends the limitations of time and landscape without negating the particularities of human experience. That, too, is a kind of advent.
The Word coming in judgment is the Word conveying hope. We take hold of what we have received – the Word of God written and proclaimed. We keep it by continual repenting. But why repentance? Because that is to take hold of the truth by which we find ourselves wanting. We seek God’s judgment whose justice is mercy and in whose good will lies all our hope. This is, I think, the theological point.
We awaken to hope by repenting. “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand;” the recurring Advent refrain. It means a change of mind, our learning how to think after the things of God. The word is metanoia. It is a kind of mindfulness, not of worldly aims and projects but a mindfulness of God which opens us to the truth of God, the true and only measure of our lives. Cranmer’s great Collect for this day captures a fundamental feature of classical Anglicanism in highlighting the Scriptures as the essential foundation, first and foremost, for our thinking and being. It draws upon Paul’s great insight about the end and purpose of the Scriptures in our learning from them; “hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,” we pray. For only by “patience and comfort of God’s Holy Word” may we “embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life.” That is to “remember what we have received and heard; keep that and repent.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent II, 2025