The season of Advent epitomises for me that strange but entrancing aspect of Christianity, and I expect other religions, which we experience in a very few great churches or other numinous places, where we feel we are on the threshold of heaven, while still being grounded on earth.
In Advent it is not the geographical proximity of heaven, but the close expectation and pregnant waiting for an event which is itself only a reminder of something which has already happened, an event which we celebrate anew every year and which every year reminds us how close heaven can come to earth. But Advent also reminds us that we are still waiting for a second coming and that the fulfilment of the kingdom will bring both celebration and judgement. It is a time when we share the vision of the prophets, who also glimpse the kingdom, looking forward with happy expectation to the coming of Christ, as human baby and again as heavenly king. But our happiness is modified by anxiety as what that may mean; we are conscious of our feeble humanity as we contemplate sharing in divinity.
This is always our condition, but we become more aware of it in Advent and as Advent comes round every year, we become aware too that perhaps, even probably, this waiting, this optimism mixed with anxiety must itself satisfy us, at least while we remain in our mortal bodies.
The accepted wisdom is that the prophets tell us more about their contemporary society than the future. Nevertheless, prophecy is about the future; it is a warning as in John the Baptist’s wild predictions and an inspiration as in Isaiah’s stately and charming albeit implausible vision, but in both cases it relies for its message on foretelling what will happen. It is about how that future should shape our present conduct.
The nature of those predicted events may well reflect the anxieties and aspirations of their first audience; Isaiah’s listeners longing for righteous ruler in place of the rather hopeless contemporary kings; or John’s followers longing for a leader to throw off the Romans and perhaps conscious of the guilt that had led to the punishment of Roman rule. For both righteousness as the remedy. For John that will start with repentance; for Isaiah in restoration; a return to the good old Kings David and Solomon, the days of Israel’s glory and even back to the Garden of Eden, when the animals and men were truly innocent, harmless and in harmony one another. For both John and Isaiah righteousness is a restoration of a right relationship with God, by fear and by inspiration but in both cases by hope.
Paul tells us that “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and the by the encouragement of scripture we might have hope.” But what sort of instruction are the prophecies we heard today? The axe has not been set to the root; many trees bearing wicked fruit continue to flourish in our world; and we have not seen the cow and the bear grazing together nor children playing harmlessly on snakes nests, not even metaphorically. So what would Paul have us learn from these readings which either get the future wrong, or are taking a very long time to come true.
One of our problems today is that we have become suspicious of the idea of progress. We have seen the collapse of supposedly Christian colonialism which has generally left a rather worse mess than obtained before we marched in to civilise the savages. And Marxism, a parallel version of progress, has done no better. The idea of progress supposes that mankind is in control, capable of making a difference and responsible, whether individually or as a community. It is not just that history of the last century has made us doubt whether he is in control; the prevalent theories about how the world works severely limit human responsibility and initiative. Darwin’s theory of evolution is in a refined form, universally accepted (outside some churches and church schools, that is) but like its sister theory of market economics, it leaves one cold; where is human responsibility and choice which we feel that we have, and certainly want to have?
Can John’s threats and Isaiah’s visions fill these gaps. I think they can by giving us hope- irrational and hard to swallow, but nevertheless grounds for optimism, and faith in the possibility of human progress.
I am aware, of course, that huge improvements have been made in human welfare, in health, education and in the position of women and that many of these result from the intervention of essentially Christian cultures and Christianity itself; but there have been huge failures and mistakes too.
The most striking and serious failure of modern man must be the already disastrous, and threateningly cataclysmic, disrespect for the natural world. There is a certain irony that this should have come about largely through the desire for economic progress. This regression is, however, something that was, and I hope remains, within human control, and Isaiah’s vision and John’s threats may inspire and frighten us into regaining control, by recognising our mistakes of greed and over ambition and restoring that righteous sense of where we stand in God’s creation. Hope is at the centre of both Isaiah’s and John’s prophecies; it a hope based on the possibility of repentance and forgiveness for the past and extraordinary, seemingly impossible vision of the future. Together they can restore our confidence in our humanity, provided that we see ourselves as creatures of God, so sharing something of his divinity. With this confidence I believe that we can tackle not only the environmental disaster we have inflicted on ourselves and our fellow creatures, but equally can begin to correct the economic and humanitarian disasters that afflict our fellow men.
This restoration of confidence is right for Advent. If we have a receptive imagination we may sometimes experience the feeling that a great architectural space or a landscape somehow adds up to more than physical materials from which they are made. Without fully grasping it we feel hints of the divine. But to do this we need some confidence in our ability to perceive the divine and we need some hope of heaven. So it is in Advent when we can hope and regret in the knowledge that we are close to something much bigger than ourselves. It is the waiting, the hope and apprehension that keeps us going; waiting ready and receptive for something that may be as strange as the zoological phenomena on the Holy Mountain and as alarming as the fiery but purifying future predicted by John. Amen.