Author: CCW

“The Lord is at hand”

Last week, we thought about the questions of Advent in terms of the witness of John the Baptist and Mary, Virgin and Mother. The questions of Advent articulate an essential feature of our humanity, namely, the desire to know. Questions are not about doubting, negating, or undermining knowledge but about seeking to know more fully; in short, to understand. What we are being challenged to understand and enter into its meaning is nothing less than the motions of God’s love coming to us in the pageant of the Word.

Advent shows its meaning. It is the redemption of our humanity but that only makes sense in the awareness of sin and darkness, of evil and wickedness, not just in our troubled world – “the distress of nations”, the vagaries of natural catastrophes, “the sea and the waves roaring”, our mental anxieties, neuroses, and fears, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, as we heard on The Second Sunday in Advent. In the face of such things we are shown what God seeks for our humanity: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me,” Jesus says, which we heard last Sunday. It is a vision of wholeness and completeness, of the restoration of our humanity to its truth and being as found in God. We can, it seems, only come to this understanding through questions: our questions and the questions of God to us. Both belong to our learning and to the active form of our engagement with what is to be known, lived, and, above all, loved.

The questions of Advent, whether we start with the question of Jesus to John’s disciples in the Gospel in the Canadian BCP for The Sunday Next Before Advent – “what seek ye?”, or whether we begin with the question of the whole city about Jesus’ triumphal yet humble entry into Jerusalem, “who is this?” on The First Sunday in Advent. Or whether we then examine the implicit questions on The Second Sunday in Advent, namely, what are the Scriptures and what are they for? Not to mention, what do they teach? Or whether we ask with John the Baptist in the prison of our experiences, “Art thou he that should come or do we seek for another?” Or the questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John the Baptist, “what went ye for to see?”, all on The Third Sunday in Advent. In all of these we are presented with the desire to know and to learn.

In our Advent meditations on Wisdom Literature, we learn that “the fear of the Lord,” as Job puts it in a famous passage, “is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding” or as Proverbs and the Psalms put it, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Wisdom itself complements this by noting that “the beginning of wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction, and concern for instruction is love of [wisdom].” And why? Because of another theme in the Wisdom Literature, immortality. This speaks to the ultimate truth and dignity of our humanity as made in the image of God. As Ecclesiastes says, “God has put eternity into our minds”, even though we experience everything “under the sun” as vanity and emptiness considered in itself. Yet it points us to what is above and beyond the mundane; in short, to God. “Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man”. As Wisdom says in the face of human evil, “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity.”

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“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will … gather his wheat into the granary. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

“Hell is other people,” it is famously said in Sartre’s play No Exit. The Covid pandemic perhaps brought that idea out into the open in the fear and hatred of others but is Hell really other people? I think not and even in Sartre’s play that is really a form of self-delusion on the part of the characters who find themselves confined together after death. Hell is really themselves and not just after death but in their lives as the characters Garcin, Estelle, and Inez actually acknowledge.

But such recognitions are without any sense of repentance, without any sense of any kind of objective goodness or ethical principle that they have denied, contradicted, or violated. Garcin, the pacifist journalist is a coward who deludes himself as brave. He has died with twelve bullets through his chest, having been caught as a deserter fleeing from the war, but has been unspeakably and unbearably cruel to his wife, treating her abominably, as he admits, despite or because of her complete devotion to him. He is without any sense of remorse, let alone repentance. For that is Hell – the rejection or denial of repentance. And again for the same reason, a denial of any order or sense of an objective and ethical good. The others, too, have been utterly cruel to others in their lives. The only other thing they have in common, it seems, is a disdain for Second Empire style furniture; for Sartre, the epitome of bourgeois comfort and pretension for which he had utter contempt.

Yet somehow they know that they are in Hell but for all of their descriptions of themselves they do not know themselves. In a masterful image, they see one another but not themselves for there is no mirror, no glass in which they might see themselves, not even “in a glass darkly.” They are their darkness. Hell as other people belongs to the characters in their egotistical obsessions about themselves. As such there can be no repentance because that would mean love. Hell is the rejection or the refusal of love.

It is the modern paradox of self-consciousness without any real self-knowledge. And in the Scriptural understanding that is because of a denial or refusal to acknowledge the objective Spirit of God, the Creator and Redeemer of the world and our humanity, a refusal to seek to know even as we are known in the truth and love of God. In the imagery of Advent, they do not “look up and lift up their heads” towards the redemption of God that Advent proclaims is always nigh. They are imprisoned in themselves, oblivious to anyone or anything else. Hell is unending solipsism.

In the play, the characters allude to the traditional images of Hell. “You remember all we were told”, Garcin says, “about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl’”. All this he dismisses as “Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers! Hell is – other people.” And yet, other people are precisely those from whom they are incapable of learning anything either about themselves or anything else. There is, to be sure, no mention of God whether as Judge or Redeemer. Hell is set up, it seems, by an unnamed “they”. Who is that? other people?, society?, the world as utterly indifferent to humanity?, the existentialist Hell of having been thrown into being? Yet at the same time there is a strong sense of the reality of our choices that come to define us. The play speaks to our questions and confusions about ourselves. Hell belongs to how we think about what it means to be human.

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“Go and show John again those things which ye do see and hear”

There are two outstanding biblical figures in the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, Virgin and Mother. They come together on this day and week in the progress of Advent and in wonderful ways complement one another. On the Advent wreath, the rose or pink candle is lit in remembrance of Mary’s role in the coming of Christ.

Monday just passed was the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a commemoration that has always been part of the Prayer Book calendar since 1549. Though not mentioned in the Scripture, it belongs to the theology of the Incarnation and complements the Advent Ember Day Gospel of the story of the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary. The reading of that Gospel in Advent concentrates simply on the angelic announcement and not on Mary’s verbal response. Yet these two moments – her conception and Annunciation – belong to her role and purpose in Christ’s Incarnation.

Her conception is about her coming to be even as the Annunciation looks back to the first moment of Christ’s Incarnation – his being conceived in her womb. Her Annunciation is his Conception! The Gospel reading at the very least reminds us of her Annunciation through her fiat mihi, her ‘yes’ to God and as such teaches what belongs to the real truth and meaning of our humanity and life in prayer: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

But that, too, is the point of the ministry of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. He is in prison owing to the machinations of Herod’s wife, Herodias, who seeks his annihilation. His being in prison is another form of the darkness of Advent and yet points us to the light of Christ. In the marvel of revelation, Jesus speaks to the multitudes concerning John with a barrage of recurring questions. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” “What went ye for to see?” And again, “What went ye out for to see?” All this calls attention to the ministry of John the Baptist. Only then does he tell us his real significance: he is at once a prophet and more than a prophet.

Jesus points us to John the Baptist who points out Jesus to us next Sunday as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist’s ministry as the Evensong lesson makes clear is a ministry of preaching a baptism of water for repentance. His message is the Advent mantra: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He bids the Pharisees and Sadducees to “bear fruit that befit repentance.” But more importantly, he points to the coming of one, he says, who is “mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry;” one who “will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire” and in whose hand is the winnowing fork that will separate the wheat from the chaff.

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