Two readings today, both obviously relevant to Advent, could they hardly put a more contrasting emphasis on the coming of Christ into the world.
Isaiah’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem is, as so often, filled with visionary optimism. God is doing a new thing, can’t we see it?-That quote from a much later, 200 years later, Isaiah because the book we call Isaiah, is better seen as a compilation of the prophesies of a school of thinkers and poets, who shared a confident yet idealistic hope of Eden or Jerusalem restored. They seem to me to be a school with which Jesus had much sympathy.
It’s quite difficult to square that sympathy with the emphasis that Matthew gives to the good news in his Gospel. For Matthew, the arrival of Christ is something to be feared; whether it is a second coming which Matthew is talking about in today’s reading or Christ’s first coming as predicted by John the Baptist and likened to an axeman attacking the roots of a tree or the winnower casting away the chaff. Whether compared to a burglar in the night or Noah’s flood, Christ’s coming, Matthew says, is to be feared.
Fear is not the emotion we usually associate with the coming of Christmas, although one of the most popular carols speaks of the “the hopes and fears of all the years” being met in Bethlehem on Christmas night. Christ’s arrival in the world is indeed awesome and it was, and is, bad (and one hopes) frightening, news for the forces of evil which corrupt creation and resist the will of God being done on earth. To this extent it is fearful- but is that what the Rev. Phillips Brooks meant when he wrote those words? Perhaps he meant that Christ’s coming would realise historic hopes and address or dispel fears. That would still leave some anxiety and ambivalence to our waiting for Christmas. Brooks was writing about Bethlehem, not Jerusalem. There is, however, a complexity about the Holy City too. It is as we heard in Isaiah’s prophecy a symbol of the perfection God’s will for His world and it will be the physical location for the Resurrection, the first site for the New Creation, but it is also the fickle home of worldliness and the vindictiveness that will lead to crucifixion. The disciples were quite right to fear the way to Jerusalem, as Herod and the Jewish Establishment were right to fear what was happening in Bethlehem too.
Are we to fear Christmas? Should we be trembling not partying in Advent? Should it not be for us the season of hope? Without being Zionists we can understand the feeling behind “Next Year in Jerusalem” Jerusalem is a powerful symbol of hope. And that hope is first realised in the stable in Bethlehem, only a few miles away.
I believe it was C S Lewis who observed that while the vices mostly look backwards, the virtues are forward looking. I do not know the context in which he said this, but while it’s true that both virtues and vices affect present feelings and conduct, Pride, Envy and Anger are our response to experience; we have allowed doing better than others to infect us with feelings of entitlement or we allow past hurt to overrule rational reaction. Faith, Hope and Charity are our ways to making things better, for ourselves and others and in that they work on our present condition and the future. Faith and trust bring comfort now; love and charity are our responses to immediate need, with a view to making things better in future.
This is relevant to how we think about Advent, when we look forward to an event which know has already happened. The emphasis of the Gospels is on the immediate and final presence of Jesus. The Gospels describe the events of a particular time in particular place, and events which happen once and for all as the fulfilment, of years of prophecy. Not fulfilment of that prophecy as most people expected, but those who experienced the presence of Jesus and were in no doubt as to the immediate and life changing effect of the encounter. It would affect their future action but much more significantly, what that encounter meant was an awareness of eternal life; that is an awareness that this life with all its pain and tribulations was and is not all there is. Instead, we understand that we are, each of us important in God’s eternal eyes, and have lives to lead which matter in the never-ending context of creation and God’s intention for His world.
Faith and Charity will follow from that realisation, but it is Hope that characterises it. Hope recognises that, despite the revelation of God’s love and the empowerment of salvation, something is yet missing. There is an absence in the world in which there is still so much suffering. Hope is the awareness of that absence as well as the confidence that it can be overcome. It is the awareness of the darkening days but the certainty that as the darkness reaches its full extent, light will come again into the world. Hope is what makes us certain that who we are and what we do matter in God’s timeless eyes.
Local aficionados of micro-breweries will know of the beer brewed in the crypt of St Mary the Virgin, Primrose Hill. Its profits go to charity and the strap line on the bottles is “Faith, Hops and Charity” Beer is poor stuff without the fruity bitterness of hops, and life, even a life of faith and good works is missing much if not sharpened and invigorated by Hope. It’s that Hope which should be in our thoughts this Advent; a hope that recognises and may embrace the fearsome awe of Christ’s immanence and his imminent arrival. Amen.