Advent Sunday

 

The First Sunday in Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year. Advent, for many people, is either barely present in the rush of work, school, travel plans and buying presents, or it is seen as a kind of minor version of Lent, vaguely gloomy and depressing. I take this opportunity once again to quote in extenso the admirable Advent meditation of Dom David Bird OSB, a Benedictine monk.

During the season of Advent, the Church proposes for our attention four truths which are general enough and profound enough to shape our whole spiritual life.

 The first is that, whoever we are, whatever our vocation, whether our life is happy or sad, fulfilled or frustrated, useful or a waste of time, interesting or boring, in harmony with God or sinful, it is destined to change; and what we consider normal now will, one day, become a thing of the past. This is true at every level of life and for everybody, and is even true of the whole creation in which we live. All will eventually end, because God so wills it. God is not in favour of every change, but his Providence is at work in every change.

   The second Advent truth is that Christ is present in every change, even if the change has been brought about against his will, and, at the end of every change, Christ will manifest himself to each and every one of us in a new way, taking into account what has happened, if we allow him. This will go on happening until  his Second Coming in which the whole of creation will be transformed into a new heaven and a new earth, and his presence will be manifested in a new and definitive way.

   This Sunday we celebrate the presence among us of the Risen Christ, as we do every Sunday; but, because it is Advent, at the same time, we are warned not to be satisfied with the level of our Christian life, our own holiness or our degree of commitment, nor closed to Christ's challenges when they involve us in change.  While we are alive, we can be confident that Christ has much more for each of us, and that he wants to make us capable of receiving what he has to offer. He would prefer our firmament should cave in, our whole world collapse rather than allow us to sink into a mire of complacency that would make us impervious to his grace. The Church has given us Advent as an antidote to complacency.  To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often, as Blessed John Henry Newman said, and Christ wishes to accompany us; and, round every corner, after every change, Christ is ready to meet us, to offer us something new.

   The third Advent truth is that when we meet Christ, we never meet him alone. Christ is in heaven and does not leave it when he comes to meet us. Where Christ is, there are Our Lady, the angels and saints. Whether in the Mass where we meet him as a Church, or in our hearts when we meet him in prayer, or when we recognise him as present in every situation, heaven and earth become one. 

   We talk about Christ coming to us; but the early Church talked about our ascending into heaven, even as we remain physically on earth.   This is the theme of the Letter to the Hebrews and of the Apocalypse. It is a further paradox that, the more we are united to Christ who is in heaven, the more heaven is present on earth through us.

   Is it not strange that, in the early Church, when the Liturgy was at its most communal, when there was so much emphasis on the Church as the body of Christ, that Christians should have gone into the desert to become hermits? Was it a flight into non- Christian individualism? It may have been for some; but the classical Christian hermit was anything but an individualist. What united him or her to the Christian community was that both he or she and the community believed they were citizens of heaven before they were citizen of this world, precisely because they were members of Christ's risen body. The monk believed that, because of his own weakness, he could not really become what baptism had made him, a citizen of heaven, without entering a monastery or going into the desert.   Did you know that the word "cell", used for a monk's room, was believed to have the same root as "coelum" because, just as the Christian community was raised in the Eucharist to share in the liturgy of heaven, so the monk in his cell was raised up to heaven in his prayer, and his solitude was filled with Our Lady, the angels and saints who prayed with him, and even with all those on earth who are united to Christ in his risen body.  No space on earth was more populated than a hermit's cell! Moreover, people went to visit hermits and monasteries because they believed that, through the monks life of sacrifice and prayer, sacred spaces are formed where heaven and earth are united.

   The fourth Advent truth is that heaven changed radically when Jesus, having died and risen again, ascended into his Father's presence. The Incarnation had brought about a new relationship between God and his creation. When this relationship was perfected by Christ's obedience unto death and became the central reality in heaven by means of Christ's ascension, heaven became the new reality into which the whole human race and the whole of creation were destined to be transformed.   It became the ultimate destiny of all that is. Jesus said that this generation will not pass until all these things shall happen; and in a certain and real sense this is exactly what took place when Christ ascended into heaven. For this reason, the early Christians never changed the texts in which Christ foretold the end of the world. We are in the last days, not, as the Jehovah Witnesses believe, because some world-destroying calamity is about to happen, but because every time we celebrate Mass, every time we pray, every time we meet Christ in the circumstances of the present moment, we are brought into the Father's presence by Christ in the Spirit, and we share directly in heaven which is God's final solution for the whole of creation; and every time we go to Mass or simply pray, Christ, Our Lady, the angels and saints enter our world through and in us.

  Advent is the time when we remember that this life receives its value only in so far as it incarnates God's will revealed to our faith in Christ's presence.  As the gospel today teaches us, we must be awake, ready to receive him and not pass our time in debauchery and drunkenness.   In every situation we must pray, "Come, Lord Jesus," and he will be there. 

   In this world of change, we find Christ's will in the present moment. We must not try to re-create a past that is agreeable to us, because God's will is not to be found there. Nor must we seek our fulfilment in an imaginary future, because that is our own creation, not God's. We must find God's will where Christ is, in the present; but we must not be so attached to present circumstances that we try to hold on to them when it is God's will that they be changed. 

   We must become Advent Christians for whom everything in this world, past, present and to come, must make way for the Christ who comes. Only our self-will stands in the way.

 

Dom David Bird, OSB (from his blog Monks and Mermaids at http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.fr/

THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE?

7. All mine enemies whisper together against me : even against me do they imagine this evil.

8. Let the sentence of guiltiness proceed against him : and now that he lieth, let him rise up no more.

9. Yea, even mine own familiar friend, whom I trusted : who did also eat of my bread, hath laid great wait for me. (Ps. 41)

12. For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour : for then I could have borne it.

13. Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me : for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.

14. But it was even thou, my companion : my guide, and mine own familiar friend.

15. We took sweet counsel together : and walked in the house of God as friends. (Ps. 55)

Given the peculiar and oniric relation of the Gospels to the Psalms, I am moved to wonder whether we might not find in these passages the beginnings of an explanation for the strange conduct of Yehuda of Kerioth. 

I have always found the explanation in John 12:6, that Yehuda (Judas) was the group’s thievish treasurer, scarcely believable; and the whole story of the actual ‘betrayal’, the kiss in the park, too theatrical to make sense. As Yeshua himself said, he was not exactly hiding himself: he taught and preached in public practically every day, and the Temple guards could have taken him whenever they wanted. He did not need to be identified.

Once again, I am transgressing Benedict XVI’s injunction against writing a ‘Jesus novel’: first, I believe that if His actual, historical existence as a man in Galilee is of such crucial importance, then whatever we can find out or reasonably deduce about that existence is worth while; secondly, a combination of a historian’s and a reporter’s mind makes me bridle at improbabilities and search for what might actually have happened. 

And in the case of Yehuda of Kerioth, there is a possible narrative. That it comes to us from the Psalms would normally invalidate it at least in part: the Psalms are poetry, and from a time much earlier than the Gospels. Yet the relation between the two is so strange and close at times as to be unnerving. Most of us discover it first in Psalm 22, parts of which read like a description of the Crucifixion even unto the foolish details of the soldiers dicing for the robe; and we meet it again in Psalm 69:22: ‘They gave me gall to eat : and when I was thirsty they gave me vinegar to drink.’

Does this mean that Yeshua modelled his life upon the Psalms? That the Evangelists took Psalm passages to fill in details of the Crucifixion? Or that there was a deeply strange but real coincidence between the two? My narrative concerning Yehuda, I suppose, postulates the third of these possibilities. Here it is.

Imagine that from the beginning of the Disciples’ life as a group it was Yehuda who was the ‘disciple that Jesus loved’. That it was he who was the ‘familiar friend’, especially close to the Master; that it was with him that the Meshiach took sweet counsel in the Temple and who had the favoured place beside him at meals. 

And then, gradually, over the two or three years that we know of, Yochanan the ‘Son of Thunder’ began to make inroads upon that relationship. He it was, young and charming, who wormed his way into Yeshua’s confidence; he it was who became the new favourite. One can then easily imagine Yehuda’s feelings. Disquiet growing slowly but surely and morphing into a green-eyed monster. At first, dislike turning to hatred for the young co-disciple; and little by little a turning of that hatred to the Master himself. The verses from Psalm 55 might then equally well have issued from the mouth of Yehuda of Kerioth himself. 

That the end result was a pointless but deliberate and vengeful giving-up of Yeshua to the Temple authorities makes, in this case, perfect sense. Hell hath no fury like a loving friend and disciple scorned. And it makes all the more likely and understandable, also, his instant and total remorse once the inevitable consequences of his action began to unroll, and his swift dramatic suicide.

There are holes in this narrative, sure; but it seems to me a great deal more likely than the grubby suggestion that he had been stealing shekels. Poor Yehuda. It would indeed have been better for him had he never been born. And yet, if this story is true, may there not, at the end of time, be mercy even for him?