Author: CCW

“And what more shall I say? For time would fail me …”

“Behold, the days come,” we heard this morning from Jeremiah and now again this evening from Malachi, we hear “for behold, the day comes.” In the order of the Christian Scriptures, Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament and deliberately so, it seems to me. It ends, as we heard this evening, with the prophetic words about those who fear the Lord even if our “words have been stout against God,” provided we repent. “Those who feared the Lord and thought on his name” are those whose names, it seems, are recorded not in the book of the dead, as in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Sumeria, but in “a book of remembrance.” It ends with a sense of the day of judgment, “burning like an oven” that leaves “neither root nor branch” unscathed, but also with another sense of judgment, the sense of hope and healing: “for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings.” It signals, too, the sending of the prophet, Elijah, “before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” who “will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers.”

Most intriguing words. In the context of Advent, the prophecy about Elijah is understood to be fulfilled in John the Baptist, the one who is sent to prepare the way of the Lord. No wonder that Malachi is placed at the end of the Old Testament, as Christians call the Jewish Scriptures. It points directly to the themes of the New Testament; in short, to the Advent of Christ.

This idea of Old and New, of the interplay and interconnection between the writings of the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament is wonderfully taken up, theologically and prophetically, in the lesson from The Letter to the Hebrews. Its authorship unknown, nonetheless, Hebrews offers a profound reflection upon the witness of the past in the history of Israel up to the present of Christ and Christianity. That is, of course, controversial and somewhat polemical; necessarily and deliberately so, for in the Christian understanding of things, the history of Israel has its fulfillment in Christ and that is the point which the lesson tonight makes.

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“The end of the matter … Fear God and keep his commandments”

A time of endings and beginnings is signalled on this day we call The Sunday Next Before Advent. There is something profound and wonderful in these moments of transition, yet it is not without some ambiguity. Do we end the year on a note of weariness and exhaustion? Too many books, so little time? “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” after all, whether it be books in print or e-books. Are we frustrated and perplexed with the relentless sameness of yet another year, a year in which, once again, there seems to be no progress, no change from the endless and dismal stories of hardship and struggle? If anything, it might seem that there is more grief and trouble, more sadness and dismay. “Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes,” as Leonard Cohen’s song puts it rather cynically. It may seem that we have been “fed with the bread of tears” and have had “plenteousness of tears to drink” as the psalmist puts it (Ps. 80).

Do we end, as Ecclesiastes seems to suggest, simply with the sombre awareness of death and mortality, the feebleness of old age and the barrenness of winter? “That time of year,” as Shakespeare puts it, “when yellow leaves or none or few/ do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” an image which evokes at once old age and ecclesiastical ruins; a pile of holy stones, a Tintern Abbey centuries before Wordsworth.

Do we end, then, weary and worn with the attempts to take the world by storm only to find that the mysteries of life continue to elude us? If so, then we end well, it seems to me. Because to confront the vanities of our pursuits and ambitions is to stand on the brink of a great wisdom, the wisdom of God which alone can redeem and heal our weary souls.

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“Behold, the days come”

The times of endings return us to our beginnings. We come to the ending of the Church Year and to the beginning of yet another. Today is The Sunday Next Before Advent. With Advent, we begin again.

But what does it mean, these endings which bring us back to our beginnings? What does it mean to begin again? The mere repetition of the same old things in the same old places with the same old faces whether few or none or more, “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”? Or is it the dance of God’s grace and glory in human lives, come what may in the distresses and disorders of our world and day?

We come to the end of a year of grace and take stock of our lives in the light of God’s grace. It marks a kind of harvest-time, as it were, for our souls, a gathering up of the fruits of grace of the past year in our lives, which is why for centuries upon centuries the Gospel for this Sunday was about “the gathering up of the fragments” from Christ’s feeding of the multitudes in the wilderness. But it means too, that we are returned to our beginning, to Him who is the foundation and meaning of our lives. “Come and see.” The grace is God’s Word revealed.

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“I say not unto thee, until seven times; but seventy times seven”

Don’t worry, it’s not a math test. Quite the opposite. Jesus is pointing to something altogether beyond number though using numbers to make the spiritual point about forgiveness which is an infinite quality that cannot be constrained and tied down to a finite and calculative logic. After all, 490 or 490,000 or 490,000 trillion is just more of the same – one finite number after another. It is what Hegel called the false or spurious infinite (schlechtes unendliche) and not the true infinite.

Between “The Holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints” and “The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting” in the Apostles’ Creed, there is “The Forgiveness of sins.” I like to think of it as being the bridge between the community of the faithful and our individual participation in that spiritual community. A most important doctrine or teaching, yet the forgiveness of sins is either poorly understood or openly rejected.

Recently someone, closely connected to the therapeutic culture, remarked on the upswing in couples’ counselling and added that, surely, I must see a lot of that, too, since forgiveness is such a powerful concept and idea. Well, forgiveness is a most powerful concept and idea but, sadly, I am not sure that it is at all wanted when blame-and-exit is the real game and where there are really only victims jockeying for position. Thus the Church’s pastoral and priestly ministry is not wanted at all and precisely because of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins. It is an almost too powerful and poetic idea for our prosaic and practical world.

Yet forgiveness is the great and necessary thing. It has a special force and potency in the Christian religion and challenges the contemporary culture of cut-and-run, do-it-and-be-done, get-it-and-be-gone, and let’s just move along. To be sure, there are no end of difficulties and hardships, especially in relationships, but the forgiveness of sins gives us a way to look at ourselves and one another differently and not just as the hurt and the hurting. It requires us to look at ourselves and one another as God sees us. That is the true wonder. How does God see us? As sinners who have been forgiven.

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