Christ Church

“My words shall not pass away”

We live in the end times. That is actually a striking feature of Christian hope and witness because it is not simply about the passing events of the day but the constant hope of our looking to God now and always. In short, it is about our awakening to the eternal Word and truth of God as that by which “we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life”. Hope and comfort in the face of darkness and despair. Indeed, as Luke puts it, “this shall be a time for you to bear testimony” (Lk. 21.13). In other words, it is not simply the events and circumstances of our times that define us but how we face them.

That has very much to do with the witness of the Scriptures to “the God of patience and consolation”, “the God of hope”. In the Epistle reading from Romans, the word hope predominates. It appears four times. The resounding note of hope is emphasized as essential to the whole purpose and meaning of God’s Word written. “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” Paul writes, referencing, paradoxically, the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament. The things written for our learning will come to include Paul’s words which comprise such a large part of the Christian Scriptures of the New Testament. There is an important emphasis on the theme of Revelation, what is mediated by God to us through the Scriptures.

Our readings this morning open us out to the doctrine of Revelation, to the idea of the Scriptures received and understood in the Church as “a doctrinal instrument of salvation”, to capture in a phrase both Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker. As such, the Scriptures are neither an arbitrary collection of texts nor a mere reservoir of information; instead, they set before us a whole way of thinking upon God and his will for our humanity. This is succinctly and wonderfully expressed in today’s Collect which is, perhaps, the most well known of the twenty-four original Collects composed by Thomas Cranmer. It reveals his distinctive signature of drawing upon the appointed Scriptural readings. It is about praying the Scriptures understood credally.

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“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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