The month before Christmas is, for most western Christians,
Advent. I don’t know how it works in the southern hemisphere but it fits in
well with the shortening days, the growing cold, the deepening darkness. In
older days, when you never knew if your land had produced enough food for the
drought of winter, it was a worrying time. ‘Will we survive?’
For Christians desperation has always been lurking in our
spiritual life. Many people talk about Advent as being about Heaven and Hell,
about Death and Judgement, and the weakness of medieval theology was that it
imagined the crisis was after death. For most people throughout history life
has been fearful, brutal and often short. To be a Christian in many places
today is to be at least concerned not so much about what happens after you die,
but how you might die as a Christian, or how bad living as a Christian may be
when so many people are against you. It may just be the mocking of the
supercilious and ignorant, it may be the violence of a Hindu or Muslim
extremist, or a dictator who just hates you. It may be sudden death at their
hands.
Advent is about the coming of Christ’s reign of justice and
mercy, of graciousness and generosity. The great hymns like ‘Lo! He comes with
clouds descending’ have a literalist understanding, and I wish I had that too.
But certainly the Christian ideal in the New Testament is that God’s reign on
earth is something to which we should look forward, no matter how terrifying
medieval religion made it. It is a time when daily bread is plentiful, where
debts are simply forgotten, where the fears of what the future, with its tests
and trials no longer mean anything. If you are living in chaotic Somalia, or oppressed
West Papua, on a decaying estate in Middlesborough, let alone Mosul or Aleppo,
God’s reign is something not only to hope for, but to be part of the process of building.
‘O come, O come Emmanuel.’ A medieval antiphon has become
part of the mood music. It is a call for rescue. We may hide it in religious
words, redeem, ransom, but they are words used by the desperate poor who have
taken their last goods to the Pawnbroker, or whose son has been kidnapped. They
are the words of desperate people. We get lulled into the cosy familiarity of
Advent, but the Gospel in the old tradition on the first Sunday was the coming
of Jesus into Jerusalem, and the rural poor shouting outside the bastion of the
urban elite, ‘Hosanna!’ Hosanna is no shout of praise. It is a cry of
desperation. Save us! Rescue us.
That is the call for the Church this Advent when so many of
the failed have been persuaded to vote for an alternative way of thinking
because the present system has failed them. It is a call to those churches
which don’t yet get involved to say that the economic structures of this world are
not the economics of the Kingdom, and they must be challenged and changed.
