Advent - a cry in the darkness

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.