Advent Hope

Gospel
Mt 24:37-44

Jesus said to his disciples:“As it was in the days of Noah,so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.In those days before the flood,they were eating and drinking,marrying and giving in marriage,up to the day that Noah entered the ark.They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.Two men will be out in the field;one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill;one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake!For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into.So too, you also must be prepared,for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.”

John Pridmore in Church Times

IN GEORGE MACDONALD’S haunting tale At the Back of the North Wind, the child Diamond sees the sinking of a great ship in a terrible storm. Diamond is visited by the deeply mysterious “North Wind”, the elusive and unexplained “Wise Woman” who comes and goes in many of MacDonald’s stories.Diamond asks North Wind how she can bear the piteous cries of the drowning sailors. North Wind replies: “I will tell you how I am able to bear it, Diamond. I am always hearing through every noise the sound of a far-off song.” In Advent, we strive to catch the strains of that song.

The seeds of what we long for, of what we dare to believe will one day come to pass, must be nurtured. Advent is not a season for sitting on our hands waiting for something — or even for someone — to turn up.

The charity that offered tools for guns in Mozambique was faced with the problem of what to do with all the weaponry surrendered to it. Their brilliant solution was to cut the guns in pieces and to give them to local artists as raw material for their work. Some of the pieces they made came to London and were put on show in an exhibition held in the Oxo tower.The exhibition, six years ago, was something of a sensation. One sculpture was entitled Catching the peace bird. A critic commented: “The peace bird of the sculptor is no gentle dove with an olive branch. It is feisty, feral creature which needs to be grasped and, perhaps, tamed.” Peace, as much as war, has to be waged.

In Advent, we tend to ask what is going to happen, and when. Jesus turns all such questions back on us. To use long words, Christian eschatology is through-and-through ethical. What we are we told about what is to come is not to provide us with information, but with motivation. Jesus does not say when it is all going to end, for the simple reason that he himself does not know.Some of the early editors of our Gospel reading, embarrassed by Jesus’s admission of ignorance, left out those three little words — “nor the Son” — that tell us so much about the humanity of Jesus. Jesus does not satisfy our curiosity. He tells us how to live.The paradox of the coming Kingdom is that it is both a realm to which we advance one small step at a time — a sewing machine for an AK-47, a well of fresh water instead of a two-hours’ walk to a brackish river, a communion table open to children — and also a personal visitation that will overtake us, unannounced: “The coming of the Son of Man”. What the latter means is beyond us: what has to be done in the mean time is not.