Learning from Israel
In Advent we step back to the landscape of the Hebrew Bible, to recover our bearings and to understand afresh what it means to have a Messiah. The Hebrew Bible maps a great space of hope, and to embrace that space we need to declutter our lives of all the inessential things that fill them up and suffocate us. Not only the moral trash, or time-wasting pastimes and curiosity, but even the good things that demand and disperse our energies and prevent us from practising singleness of purpose.
In Advent we rediscover the importance of the First Covenant, which directs us unerringly to the Living God of Israel, and which trains us in the fundamental attitudes of faith and hope. It is often because we slight that first covenant that our grasp of the covenant sealed in the blood of Christ becomes narrow or abstract or unreal. As we prepare to celebrate his coming we must wait for him where he actually appeared, in Israel’s great space of hope. The prophets were passionate for righteousness, and angry at the triumph of rich and powerful people who were rich and powerful. The triumph of evil was enabled by the spinelessness, indifference, or lack of empathy of the multitude, and the prophets constantly sought to sensitize our conscience. The scandal of triumphant evil, impotent good, and divine silence in face of the resultant catastrophes remains the greatest obstacle to faith today as it was in ancient Israel. The modern critique of religion from Voltaire to Dawkins adds little to this basic scandal, to which the last century and the present one have added new chapters of horrors. But was God silent? His voice resounds in the desert and in the hearts of those who make space to hear it. Stepping back to Israel we commit to playing our daily part in the eternal battle of good and evil, confident that God is on our side.
The hope of Israel found a galvanizing focal point in the figure of the Messiah, the son of David, sometimes imaged as a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven to establish justice on earth. To understand the meaning of Christ it is good to meditate on these biblical conceptions of the Messiah. Theologians today puzzle over the question, ‘Why do we need a Saviour, and from what?’ Such a question would have puzzled the prophets, for they registered the full depth of human woe, and clung to God as their sole refuge. All the various promises by which God replied to their longing for salvation, notably the promise of a Messiah, deserve to be gratefully recalled in the Advent season, so that we can refresh our understanding of what is at stake in the mission of Jesus of Nazareth, prophetic teacher and healer, but more than that, the very embodiment of promised salvation: ‘For all the promises of God are “Yes” in him’ (2 Cor 1:20).
This is why the church takes us back to the founding Israelite experience for the first month of every liturgical year, encouraging us to renew our contact with the path of life that the First Covenant offers. Wholesome and invigorating in itself, this Jewish path is essential for an understanding of our Jewish Saviour, who fulfils it but in no way supersedes it. We used to say, with St Bernard, ‘per Mariam ad Iesum, through Mary to Jesus,’ but we should also say ‘per Israelem ad Iesum, through Israel to Jesus.’ She stands at the threshold of the Gospel, as the embodiment of Israel’s hope, along with the Baptist. They are our models of a wise emptying and clearing of the space of hope, in humility and simplicity of life, so that Christ can enter in.
The author of the book of Baruch is a rather obscure figure, who got into the Bible by the skin of his teeth. The name is that of Jeremiah’s secretary, but he may be writing centuries later than Jeremiah. The book is deutero-canonical, being absent from the Hebrew Bible and consequently from Protestant Bibles, and it found its way even into the Catholic Bible, the Vulgate, very belatedly, only in the ninth century, St Jerome having excluded it from his translation in the fifth.
Baruch’s theme is unprepossessing too: a meditation on the worst period in Jewish history, the long exile in Babylon. In language less heartfelt and dramatic than that of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the book of Lamentations, Baruch sighs morosely over Israel as a hopeless case. He recycles the ancient monitions about the waywardness of Israel and the displeasure of God, about the need to relearn the paths of Wisdom and Torah, about the urgency of returning to the Lord with tenfold zeal. But does he feel that no one is really listening, that the the message is dying on his own lips?
One imagines him as a familiar figure on the preaching circuits, always to be relied on to recite eloquently the old lore, and to reassure the audience, even in what were then modern times, with a sense of their ancient identity as Israel, the people scolded by God. But even when old Baruch evoked the two most glorious moments of redemption in Israel’s past, namely the exodus from Egypt and the return from the Babylonian captivity, he may have done so with a sinking feeling that all this had been heard before and was making no real impact.
But poetry takes over at the end, in the passage the Church serves up for our delectation today: ‘Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God’ (5:1). Human mediocrity is intractable and irreformable, indifference and mockery are impregnable, but God remains God: ‘Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them’ (5:5).
This happy ending is a surprise of the Spirit, stirring people to the depth of their souls. The divine ‘medicine of mercy’ bears no relation to the unworthiness of its recipients. They can continue to look at themselves in morose defeatism, convinced that nothing will ever change, and that their lives and institutions have settled into a condition of paralysis. Or they can hear the shout of joy that breaks out on Zion and tells that the Lord is nigh (Isaiah 40).
Every year Advent springs on us from nowhere, bringing just such a messsge. We thought the game was played out and that promises of redemption were mere dreams. But we missed the resources of the divine player, who can overturn the most settled and sullen indifference and teach us to dance anew to the old music, which is ever new.
Dec 12
What an unexpected command: ‘and again I say, Rejoice!’
Usually we come crawling before the Lord in need and guilt, but He says to us, ‘Stand up, and rejoice!’ We singled out the seven Penitential Psalms as particularly important, but there are many more psalms that enable us to shout and sing in praise of God and his beautiful creation. Praise, not lamentation, is the basic tone.
Our morose and worried faces prompted Nietzsche’s mockery: these people do not look redeemed. ‘Redemption was for Nietzsche not a deliverance from sin, but a total affirmation of life, with all its pain, suffering and absurdity’ (Eva Cybulska). Rilke, who inherited Nietzsche’s girlfriend Lou Andreas-Salome, also took this up in a famous poem just a century ago, in December 1921:
Oh speak, poet, what do you do?
–I praise.
But the monstrosities and the murderous days,
how do you endure them, how do you take them?
–I praise.
But the anonymous, the nameless grays,
how, poet, do you still invoke them?
–I praise.
What right have you, in all displays,
in very mask, to be genuine?
–I praise.
And that the stillness and the turbulent sprays
know you like star and storm?
: –because I praise.
Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust ?
– Ich rühme.
Aber das Tödliche und Ungestüme,
wie hältst du’s aus, wie nimmst
du’s hin ?
– Ich rühme.
Aber das Namenlose, Anonyme,
wie rufst du’s, Dichter, dennoch an ?
– Ich rühme.
Woher dein Recht, in jeglichem
Kostüme, in jeder Maske wahr zu sein ?
– Ich rühme.
Und daß das Stille und das Ungestüme
wie Stern und Sturm dich kennen ?
: – weil ich rühme.
Not only Christmas, but Advent too, is an invitation to joy. Let not our Christian language of joy decay into drab formulas while our language of sin and guilt swells and festers. If we end the day with an act of contrition, let us at least begin it with praise. If Nietzscheans can find praise welling up in their souls, even though they thought God was dead, how much more should we, who know the living God of Israel, find joy to be the natural reaction to the miracle of each morning. Just use the words, and they will free up the springs of spontaneous praise:
O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and be glad in him with psalms.
For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth and the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have moulded the dry land.
Come, let us worship and bow down and kneel before the Lord our Maker.
For he is our God; we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever. Amen. (Ps 95:1-7 = the ‘Venite’ of Anglican Matins)
Dec. 19
The most beautiful part of the New Testament is Luke’s Infancy Narrative, which is like an enclosed garden, populated only by beautiful people. Luke, after his opening statement of purpose, which is considered the most perfect Greek sentence in the New Testament, dips his pen in the style of the Septuagint to paint a model Jewish world, describing the Baptist’s parents as ‘both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and regulations of the Lord, blameless’ (Lk 1:6). The old couple are depicted with much humour. Then after the sublime scene of the Annunciation, Mary sets off eagerly to share her good news with Elizabeth (1:39) and their meeting is a moment of utter joy, yielding those words of Elizabeth that we recite every day: “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (1:42). Not without humour is the image of John the Baptist bouncing joyfully in her womb (44); reverence would have held Luke back from giving a similar account of Jesus.
This scene of the Visitation inspired Sts Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal to found a religious order, the Visitandines, who were supposed to visit the poor on charitable errands, but became an enclosed contemplative order. They would perpetuate this short biblical scene, letting it shape their whole existence. Let us enter into that scene this morning, thinking of Mary, her haste to be with her kinswoman and to help her, staying with her till the birth; thinking of Elizabeth, her deep gratitude to God for granting her a son, like Sarah of old; her prophetic insight, like that of Simeon and Anna further on, she being filled with the Holy Spirit; her sense of family bonds, as wife, mother, cousin to Mary, aunt to Jesus; her noble heritage as a daughter of Aaron (1:5); her patient endurance and resignation in the long years of sterility; here forthrightness of character and speech, shown again when she insists against family tradition that her son’s name will be John (as the angel prescribed, 1:13). John is Hebrew Yohanan, meaning ‘graced by God.’ Grace pervades the scene of the Visitation and all the scenes of the Infancy Narrative, grace abounding blissfully, unalloyed, unshadowed, as nowhere else in Scripture.
Think also of the contemplative peace and calm that emanates from this story, the deep and quiet love of God that eventually bursts forth in the canticles of Mary and Zechariah. Queen Elizabeth was worthy of her patron saint when she said recently to the bishops of the church of which she is Supreme Governor: “The list of tasks facing that first General Synod may sound familiar to many of you – Christian education, Christian unity, the better distribution of the ordained ministry. … But one stands out supreme: ‘To bring the people of this country to the knowledge and the love of God.’”
Harmony of charitable action and serene contemplation is set forth in exemplary form in these Jewish women so masterfully painted by St Luke (said to have been a painter, with a portrait of Mary that circulated in later times). They are the first in a long string of women who grace his Gospel and set it off from the others. All contemplatives tell us that to enjoy the knowledge and love of God we must awaken the feminine depths of our soul, something rather countercultural, but Christmas is the time for it.
On 2 July 1660, Bossuet preached on the Visitation before another English queen, Henrietta Maria (Henrette-Marie, 1609-1669), daughter of Henri IV, widow of Charles I and mother of the Restoration monarchs Charles II and James II. She had a troubled life, father assassinated, husband decapitated, and her militant Catholic faith putting her at odds with Britons. Bossuet speaks of ‘a hidden God, whose virtue acts in hearts in a secret and impenetrable way. I see four persons united in the mystery we honour: Jesus and the divine Mary, St. John and his mother St. Elizabeth; this is the whole subject of our Gospel. But what I find most remarkable is that, except for the Son of God, all these sacred persons visibly exercise some particular action. Elizabeth, enlightened from above, recognizes the dignity of the Blessed Virgin, and humbles herself deeply before her: Undè hoc mihi? John feels the presence of his divine Master even in his mother’s womb, and testifies with incredible transports: Exultavit infans. However, the happy Mary, admiring in herself such great effects of the divine omnipotence, exalts with all her heart the holy name of God and publishes his munificence. Thus all these persons act, and it is only Jesus who seems immobile: hidden in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, he makes no movement that makes his presence perceptible; and he who is the soul of the whole mystery, appears without action in the whole mystery.’
[DeepL translation of: ‘un Dieu caché, dont la vertu agit dans les cœurs d’une manière secrète et impénétrable. Je vois quatre personnes unies dans le mystère que nous honorons: Jésus et la divine Marie, saint Jean et sa mère sainte Elisabeth; c’est ce qui fait tout le sujet de notre évangile. Mais ce que j’y trouve de plus remarquable, c’est qu’à la réserve du Fils de Dieu toutes ces personnes sacrées y exercent visiblement quelque action particulière. Elisabeth éclairée d’en haut reconnait la dignité de la sainte Vierge, et s’humilie profondément devant elle : Undè hoc mihi? Jean sent la présence de son divin Maître jusque dans le sein de sa mère, et témoigne des transports incroyables: Exultavit infans. Cependant l’heureuse Marie admirant en elle-même de si grands effets de la toute-puissance divine, exalte de tout son cœur le saint nom de Dieu et publie sa munificence. Ainsi toutes ces personnes agissent, et il n’y a que Jésus qui semble immobile : caché dans les entrailles de la sainte Vierge, il ne fait aucun mouvement qui rende sa présence sensible; et lui qui est l’âme de tout le mystère, paraît sans action dans tout le mystère.]
Dec. 25
Is it a good idea to begin a book with its climax? And could anything be more climactic than the Johannine Prologue, with its majestic statement summing up the entire meaning of Jesus and of salvation: ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn 1:14). Well, the Johannine eagle will ferry us over many heights and depths, as we traverse this infinite and inexhaustible Gospel (which grows with its readers to the degree that they can tune in to its mystical element), and will bring us in the end to a still greater climax. Not the passion and resurrection narrative, but a little phrase in the last discourse: ‘Love one another’ (Jn 15:12, 17; cf. 1 Jn 3:11; 4:7). This new commandment is the practical counterpart of the theological vision of the Prologue.
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