Christ Church

Written for our learning

Truth is judgement. A central feature of the Advent season is God’s coming in judicio, in judgement. God’s Word coming to us is truth as judgment. How does that Word come to us? By what is spoken and hear, by what is written and read . What does it mean for that Word to be learned? There is teaching but what about learning? The real meaning of learning is captured most profoundly in Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation: “be it unto me according to thy word.”

Her word is the resounding and defining mantra of the Christian Faith. God’s Word is “a lantern … and a light” unto our lives as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 119. 105), but only through its resonance in us. That resonance requires that we be attuned to that Word, as Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, for in that attunement lies our atonement, our being at one with what is spoken and heard, with what is written and read.

Mary is the outstanding figure of the spiritual landscape of Advent. It is instructive to consider her role in relation to the spiritual emphasis on the parade of Scripture on this day which is sometimes known as ‘Bible Sunday.’ “Whatsoever things were written aforetime” Paul tells us, indicating the purpose of the Scriptures. They “were written for our learning.” This is wonderfully encapsulated in today’s Collect in Cranmer’s rich phrases, “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.” It means paying attention to that word coming in judgement as the Gospel shows: “look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.” Mary is the supreme example of what it means to attend and be attuned to God’s Word, to what it means to learn the Scriptures; in short, to be defined by the Word of God in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh for both are in judicio, in judgement, too.

All teaching seeks the embodiment of what is taught. It is about ideas living in us, taking flesh in our lives, as it were. Mary hears. Mary questions, Mary commits. Her great ‘yes’ to God is essential to the Incarnation of Christ. The Word takes flesh in her and from her to be the Word made flesh, the incarnate Christ. She embodies the highest expression of what it means to be human. We are called to be good Marians, to be like Mary in her active acquiescence to the power and truth of God; in short, to let God’s Word written and proclaimed resound in us.

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Love is the fulfilling of the law.

It is the great ethical insight of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding albeit in different registers of expression. To put it another way, law is love. That is a challenging concept which requires some thought about both terms.

Advent awakens us to the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity through the coming of God’s Word to us. That idea belongs to revelation and to reason. There is the coming of God’s Word to Moses on Mount Sinai in the thunderous words of the Law encapsulated profoundly in the Ten Commandments. There is the coming of God’s Word in judgement in the powerful Gospel for the First Sunday in Advent with the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem on what Christians will later call Palm Sunday and which is here already associated with the ancient Jewish rites of the Passover. But even more, as Cranmer understood in the sixteenth century, that coming in judgement is seen most tellingly in the cleansing of the Temple, the passage which follows immediately in Matthew’s Gospel upon the entrance into the city. Here is the wrath of Jesus and yet that wrath is really love, God’s love of his own righteousness  and truth without which there is no truth or righteousness.

Thus are we awakened to the dies irae, the day of judgment which is ever-present because truth is ever-present. The judgement is the coming of God’s Word as light and truth into the darknesses of our world and our hearts. But this is actually love. Why and how? Because the coming of God to us is the goodness of God for us. And it is something known at once by revelation and by reason.

The Ten Commandments mark the climax of the ethical and educational journey of the exodus. The Book of Exodus is an ethical treatise that seeks to awaken us to a fundamental truth and principle upon which our thinking and living depend. The idea of God is not and cannot be simply a human construct – the assumption of every  garden variety atheist. The wonder of the exodus is that God makes himself known as “I Am Who I Am” to Moses in the Burning Bush. In the exodus journey in the wilderness God reveals his will for our humanity in the thunderous words of the Ten Commandments. Allah is all but it is the will of Allah, of God, that defines Jew, and Christian, and Muslim alike. But that will, which itself is nothing less than the explicit expression of the goodness of God, is something that is also known through the exercise of reason in its discovery of that upon which our knowing and reason depend, a principle which cannot by definition be defined by anything prior to it but only by everything which depends upon it.

This is wonderful but not new. For centuries upon centuries and in different ways, the Law in its summary form and as the Ten Commandments has been known as the universal moral code for our humanity, something known at once as given authoritatively but also as given for thought. In our liturgy we regularly and perhaps complacently say the Summary of the Law. We rarely hear the Ten Commandments even though in the history of our own Anglican tradition, at least until the dominance of the 19th century Gothic revival, our churches in their seventeenth and eighteenth century architectural form as auditory chapels often had on the walls of the sanctuary “The Belief,” the summary of the Christian principles of the Faith; to wit, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed. What do Christians essentially believe? There it is. We forget and neglect such things at our peril. We also misunderstand those principles when we reduce them to a set of propositions but that is another story about modern and post-modern narratives and their self-contradictions.

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