Advent

Luke 21, 36: “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.”

We stand at the beginning of a new Church year, at the beginning of Advent; and we should perhaps pause for a moment to ask ourselves what we are doing on this day. Are we looking backwards or forwards? Are we preparing to remember a great even in the past—the coming of Jesus Christ—or are we, as the word Advent itself suggests, looking forward to something that has yet to happen, our celebration of the feast of the Nativity? This is a question not just for this moment in the Church’s year, but for every moment in the life of the Church. Is our concern the past or the future? Are we a remembering institution, focused on events two thousand years ago, or is our true orientation forward, ‘forward in faith’, toward something yet to be realised?

For many of our contemporaries the Church is irredeemably locked in the past. They see it as being about the past, always trying to reach back to its own roots, denying the contemporary world and resisting change and the future. That is why many of them have little time for us.

But if you read the gospels, you very soon come to realise that Jesus’s concern was emphatically with the future: with the coming Kingdom of God, here but not yet fully here, and with all that was yet to be revealed through his own living and dying. It was Christ, after all, who told those who wished to be his disciples to leave the dead to bury the dead, to let those who had no eye for the future busy themselves with the debris of the past.

Christ was about the future; and we see him talking about the future in today’s gospel. He talks about it in a particular way, one that is not altogether natural for us, and I shall say something about that in a moment. But the point for us is that Christ’s whole mission was directed forward; yes, he was profoundly aware of the tradition out of which that mission had grown, and he saw himself as the fulfilment of that tradition: but it was the future, the coming transformation in the Kingdom, that he preached.

We might say, of today’s gospel, that Christ is speaking of the end of the world, and of his second coming: “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars … for the powers of heaven will be shaken” (21, 25-6) In the ‘mainstream’ of the Christian tradition we have become a little shy of talking about such things, a little nervous of apocalyptic language, even though every week, in the creed, we say of Christ that ‘he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.’ We have tended to leave the end of the world and the Last Days to what we often think of as the undergrowth of the Christian tradition—to millennialists of various kinds, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Adventists. We associate such preoccupations with predictions and endlessly revised dates, with Jonesville poisonings and Waco massacres. We tend to say rather little about the future. We behave, generally, as though our business is to remind the world of a wisdom that comes from the past, rather than to point ahead to what is still to come.

Advent itself may offer a way through this difficulty. We expect—we look ahead to—the Incarnation. But the Incarnation has already happened. What sense does that make? None at all, of course, within normal historical logic. What has happened has happened; what is still to come has not yet happened. But though the Incarnation is an event within history, it is unlike all other events. Jesus himself makes this clear in his exchange with the Pharisees in the eighth chapter of John’s gospel. They challenge his right to speak in the name of God, and he answers by claiming a continuity with the past and a rootedness in the tradition. He tells them that “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.” The Pharisees object, not unreasonably; they say to him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?” To which Jesus replies, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8, 56-8).

This is a strange saying, because Jesus is claiming something very strange, something quite impossible by all normal standards. He is saying that he is contemporary to all history. Unlike the rest of us, he is not confined to one historical point: he does not start in the future, come into the present, and then depart into the past. He is equally close to all historical moments. Notice that he does not say, “before Abraham was, I was,” but “before Abraham was, I am.” He is there in an eternal present that is contemporary with all time: that was why Abraham could see his day and rejoice in it, though for all normal historical understanding that day was far in the future.

If Christ is the eternal contemporary; if he belongs as much to Abraham’s time and to ours as he does to the first century in Palestine; then the Incarnation, his entry into history, is also an eternally contemporary event. When, in this Advent, we look ‘ahead’ to the coming of Christ, this is not some kind of pretence (that something has no yet happened that has already happened), nor is it a re-enactment of an event that we know, really, to be two thousand years behind us: it is a true looking ahead. Just as Christ, eternally contemporary, was, is and is to come, so the Incarnation is an eternal happening: Christ is always coming into the world, in this moment as much as in 6 BC, because the Incarnation is the point where our time connects with God’s eternity, and that eternity is equally close to all time.

For a moment, let us go back to the gospel of the day. Christ says, “There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars … men dying of fear as they await what menaces the world … and then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” We may try to get round our uneasiness by referring to the apocalyptic expectations of first century Judaism, and so consign it to the past. But if Christ is indeed eternally contemporary, we cannot consign his words to the past. Yes, he may be using the forms of speech of another age, but we still need to listen. He is telling us something about how history relates to the purposes of God.

There was a time, about twenty years ago, when it looked as though history had finally come right. The Soviet empire had collapsed. Israelis and Palestinians were shaking hands. The stock markets were set into a long upward climb. Francis Fukuyama assured us that history, in the old sense of the wars of empire and ideology, was over. Democracy was now the only serious game in town.

Well, things have moved on. History doesn’t stop, nor do we escape from it. And one thing that Jesus is saying in the gospel passage is simply that: history is history, and don’t expect history to save you. History will always serve up its reliable menu of slaughter, terror and disaster. Left to history, there is no hope for humanity.

But he also reminds us that he, Christ, is there, eternally present in every moment of history, as close to us now as he was to Mary in the stable or the disciples in the Upper Room. History will always be tough, and so he says “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen”. But if we do that, we shall be able to “stand with confidence before the Son of Man”, both at the end of time and now.

What does that mean for us as we approach Christmas 2010? It means that we should expect Christ in our lives. We should watch for those occasions, whether through the sacraments or the word of God or the love of our neighbours, when we know that we are not the prisoners of history, that we are not entirely the victims of time; when we know that we, with Christ, can enter the freedom of his eternal Advent. Amen