No one knows the Hour
Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near
Good News for the Poor
The Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son
God is on his way. He is coming to man. But what condition will he find man in?
God loves man. This news has reached us in the gospel. It tells us that we may live with God, and that in relationship with God, we can live with one another. God makes it possible for us to live together with all others. This is the news that changes everything, because it brings a greater conception of the life open to man.
The gospel has changed everything. It was the coming of this news that opened a vaster and more ambitious account of man and of the possibilities for his life with his fellows. It has altered his world from close and static, to open and dynamic. Hope arrives into his world. It introduced to him the idea of freedom, and so the prospect that every man may become a social and political being who may contribute to and participate in a public life shared by an entire society. The gospel has brought into being the political nation, of which all men are members and share a single dignity.
Christianity created our nation, which its inclination towards living in peace under one law with widening political participation. It is the coming of the gospel that created England and Britain. Our civil society and political nation depend for their renewal and continuation on the constant arrival and reception of the gospel. The news that God values us, and gives us the grace to value one another is all that maintains the way of life we know.
We should not assume that our way of life will continue as it is now. Whether it continues depends on whether we receive from the Lord the blessing that he brings.
What sort of future do we have? Where will our present course take us? What threats are coming against us? How will we survive them? Will our existing way of life continue? These the questions put to us by the Gospel that brings us news and warning of the coming of God.
In the season of Advent, the gospel calls us back out into the world that existed before the world before widespread political participation, before literacy and political participation, before the achievement of a single national law that secured the same value for all men.
We have to go back out into the pre-political undomesticated world, where the Lord is. Whatever does not help us or our society to continue we must get rid of. We should leave our self-absorption and go back out to where these issues can be seen in all their starkness. We must follow John the Baptist down into the wilderness, the place where our course is not determined by any institutions. We should listen for the call of the Lord just as our forebears did. We should follow the messengers Christ has sent.
John the Baptist stands at the frontier and calls Israel out, and people come out to him. Israel follows him down to the river, and through it into the uncivil desert on the other side. In the wilderness where there is no law and no civil society, and where no values are established, so the value of people is entirely insecure. This passage through the water is the re-enactment of Israel’s foundational years in which she followed the Lord alone, and learned an entirely new existence as his people. So Israel now re-enacts its founding as the people of God.
John the Baptist stands for all the messengers, the prophets, apostles, teachers and Christians whom the Lord has sent to us over so many centuries. All of them have been sent to us by the Lord to give us the help, the guidance and warning we need.
In Advent we learn that our society is in trouble. People have not received what they are due. Life depends on our relationship with the truth. But the truth has been concealed and the sources of our have been concealed and denied, and the poor have been dispossessed and robbed of the resources on which life depends.
We learn that the Lord himself is coming. He is willing to be our Lord. He has come because people have prayed and asked him to, because we have been too vulnerable without him
In the Nativity of Jesus, at Christmas, we learn that God has come to Man and intends to stay with him and remain with him without limit, forever. God has made himself vulnerable to us as this infant, and so given himself into our hands, as utterly graspable. As we can lift this infant and hold him, so we hold our future. Our own identity is in our own hands. All our existence is bound up in that infant, for he is going to become the source of all our humanity. We will live and prosper because he gives us life and peace and well-being.
