Awaiting Christ
2 December 2007
Today marks the beginning of a new year for the Church. We ended the Church’s year last Sunday in some style: a riot of gold, all candles lit, a satisfying fog of incense, music of the high baroque, a festal Te Deum, and a birthday celebration of one of our own, our ageless Treasurer and Registrar, the Peter Pan of Pusey House. This morning is rather more sombre and sober, rather more restrained. The New Year’s Day of the Church is not a new dawn, rather Advent Sunday is the beginning of a season of preparation for the new day, for the new dawn which will break with the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Members of the University may be further disorientated because in many colleges last Sunday they celebrated, a trifle prematurely, the birth of Christ with their Carol Services. Well, the University may think that it is all over, but for us it is just the beginning. And it is beginning with a more realistically sober reckoning of what it is to come; a time of preparation, a time of recollection. Not for the first time we are out of step with the world where Christmass Day signifies little more than the end of a period of frenzied buying and wrapping and frenetic organising. For the Christian, it marks something better and greater than the indulgence of sensory passions, a capacity for commercialisation and conspicuous consumption. For we Christians, it is the beginning of a series of theophanies that set us out on the road to salvation, such is our hope.
Advent is pre-eminently a season of hope. Christian hope is not one thing: it is two things. It is hope in this world and in this life, and it is hope for the world to come, hope in the life beyond this life, beyond this temporal sphere: earthly hope and heavenly hope, existing hope and eschatological hope. Sir John Betjeman, who had a long association with this House and with whose work many of you will be familiar, once said that he was not very good at faith, he was not very good at charity, buy, by God, did he hope. And hope in God, trust in the love of God, lies fundamentally at the heart of our religion and faith.
We have hope in this world as God’s creation. But we have hope in it as long as it lasts, for however long it is sustainable: and that may not be very much longer if some of the ecological prophets are to be believed. But while the world lasts, we may hope for progress and improvement, for the further amelioration of the lot of humanity, for material advance, no doubt, technological innovation, scientific development, medical discoveries, a greater sense of commonality, the spread of the Christian religion, the deepening of individual faith and commitment within the society and culture and world in which we find ourselves. All these are worthy enough aims and we know that God does nothing in vain. We are here not as aimless creatures of instinct and appetite merely, but we are set where we are for a purpose: for the glory of God and the well-being of man.
All our life expresses or contributes to those purposes. What we endure of suffering can help in our understanding of Christ’s suffering and of our transformation. What we learn and receive of forgiveness offers us a new start, a fresh beginning and enables us to lay claim to tomorrow. The future does not have to be lost to us, obliterated by our failings. As Austin Farrer once put it: “In our pilgrimage to God we never seem to have made even an assured beginning. All’s to do afresh and we have to stretch ourselves for the embrace of the infinite every day anew.”
But, of course, hope in this world has to be finite. There is a finitude to our present existence. The Christian religion envisages an end time. Perpetual survival cannot be guaranteed. There will be an end to human history. The early Christians had an acute and pressing sense of the end times. They thought and acted as if they were living through the end times and were anxiously awaiting the second coming of Christ and the realisation of S. John’s vision of the Apocalypse. Well, as far as we can perceive, it has not happened. But any wager on the future of human kind may well be delusive. Despite the doom-laden prognostications of some, our modern sensibility is reluctant to envisage the end of all things. But the human race is not immortal. Individual human beings have a span of life and, through Christ, they have the promise of eternal life beyond that earthly span. We instinctively recoil from the thought of human extinction. It seems such a waste of human souls, lives over before their perfection, there is not enough time for us to achieve the perfection to which we are called. It seems such a frustration of the purposes of God. But the season of Advent seeks to remind us that what we do in this world does not lead to oblivion.
We know that here we have no abiding city. We know that the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem is our true home: that what we have failed to achieve will there be achievable, that what here is unrealisable will there be realised. From this paradise of fools, we will enter into another and different paradise, the paradise of the blessed:
“O what their joy and their glory must be
Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see.”
But is that quite right? For the Jews, the Sabbath was the seventh day, the end of the week. Our Sabbath is always a beginning. And while heaven may be a destination from this life, it must necessarily be a series of beginnings and for the same reason that this life is always a beginning, and no more. Here, but even more so there, we are caught up in the infinity of God.
Heaven will always be a beginning and an exploration of the inexhaustible love and possibilities of God. Our endless Sabbaths will be constant glory, ceaseless wonder, perpetual resurrection, unconfined satisfaction, completeness, wholeness. The destiny man is everlasting companionship with God in the peace and in the everlasting felicity of heaven.
Advent points to the dawning of that possibility in the Incarnation and the Nativity of Christ: that seminal conjunction of time and eternity, of men and angels, of heaven and earth, of word and flesh:
“Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
And let the skies pour down righteousness.”
The heavens stooped down and kissed the earth, the normal state of human society was suspended; the shepherds marvelled, the angels rejoiced. And nothing was, nor ever could be the same again. If that world-shattering event has been rendered sickeningly sentimental and unchallenging in our time, it is up to us to restore the proper perspective and understanding. The world may be content to slush around in sentimentality and all the ingredients for trivialisation are there: a new-born baby, a stable, animals lowing and bleating winningly: animals and babies, plus shepherds and angels – all we need now is Richard and Judy with their peculiarly nauseating and mawkish brand of cloying populism to interview the single mother and her significant other, and, heaven help us, the odious and oleaginous Alan Titchmarsh, the bargain-basement sage of the potting shed, vacuously to opine from the rag-bag of clichés that passes for his mind, and we would be drowning in treacle.
We do not have to surrender to such bad taste and vulgarisation. The birth of Christ is a perpetually startling and significant event and our contemplation of the great Advent themes of death, judgement, heaven and hell mark out its cosmic and personal significance. Our facing these great themes serves to bring to mind the fact that our following of Christ, our discipleship, our life of service and self-sacrifice, this habit that we have of costly love, is not an amiable eccentricity, nor something that we should confine to the hours between eleven and twelve on a Sunday morning in term but it is something that speaks of who we are and what we are, and what we are meant to be, and articulates the most profound expression of our personality and being.
And we can never forget, amidst all the jollity and festive cheer, that always casting its ominous shadow over the Nativity scene is the Cross of Calvary upon which the Christ-child was destined to hang. The wood of the manger which gave his vulnerability and innocence protection, becomes the wood of the Cross where he hangs naked, exposed, unprotected from pain and suffering, despised and rejected, spat at and scorned: nothing sentimental about that. The baby in the manger at Christmass is born to die that humiliating death on the Cross of Good Friday. Through that apparent defeat, through his self-sacrifice of divine love, he wins redemption for us and a redeemed life in him.
Beyond the cosmic significance of the Incarnation and Nativity, lies their personal; significance for us as individual human souls. The fact of Christ’s Incarnation and Nativity means that the eyes of God do not look at us from an unimaginably distant and remote future. In the Incarnate Christ, we are seen by the eyes of God in the present moment, in the very heart and core of the present moment. He gave himself to enter into our human condition there and then, at a specific time in human history and in a specific place. That moment in time is perpetuated for all time, and that place is a universal kingdom so that he gives of himself still in the here and now.
Unlike most Christian communities, we do not celebrate the whole of the liturgical expression of our collective belief in Christ together. We scatter to different places, and people, and communities: some of our number have already left but wherever we are to celebrate and enjoy the Nativity, in the Church we are one, united in faith, so that when this season of Advent is over and our preparations are made, we may celebrate, wherever we may find ourselves, together the birth of the Christ-child: the Christ-child born in the humility of the stable; the Christ-child born of a pure and lowly Virgin; the Christ-child laid in a manger; the Christ-child who came to redeem the world; the Christ-child who is the Salvation of the world; the Christ-child who is the embodiment, the enfleshment of divine love, a divine love so strong, so intense, so overwhelming, so abundant, so all-embracing, so all encompassing, so generous, so sacrificial that it endured, withstood and triumphed over the savagery of the Cross. “For unto us a child is born; unto us a Son is given” a child who “For us men and for our salvation … came down from heaven; by the power of the Holy Spirit and became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.”
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library