Advent

To that point in the synagogue service nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It is not that Jesus himself chose to read that particular passage; it was probbly one of the regular lections, that by tradition was read on that particular Sabbath. It was when he sat down to comment upon it that what he said disturbed his hearers – ‘Today, in your very hearing, this text has come true!’

Today, in your very hearing, this text has come true. To his hearers, many of whom must have watched him grow up, had perhaps used his services as a carpenter, or even played with him and been educated with him as a boy, the very notion must have sounded preposterous. They did not have the advantage we have, who have read and heard the story many times, he was simply one of them. It was just a few weeks earlier that he had left the village to be baptised by John in the Jordan before venturing into the wilderness for some five or six weeks, but that did not detract from the fact that he was one of them. He had come home to his own people, the people who had known him all his life and now, here he was, asking them to believe that when Isaiah had written these words he was writing about no one other than this Jesus they had known for so many years. 

In sharp contrast to his contemporaries who were scandalised by Jesus’s claim, we, who are so familiar with the Gospels that we expect him to say such things, often fail to register the radical nature of what he says about himself, both here and also in many other parts of his story. What he says here is just what we expect of him. It is no surprise that he comes to bring good news to the poor, release to the prisoner and give sight to the blind, we are not astonished that he comes to free the broken victims or to announce the year of the Lord’s favour. That is just what we expect of him – have we not read his story so many times and, in reading it, witnessed him doing all these things and more?

Yet... can you imagine what we might say if someone came along in our day wielding the same grandiose manifesto? To be sure, it is most unlikely that we would react with the anger with which his audience attacked Jesus as Luke tells us in the next section of the story. Perhaps we would not be angry, but I suspect that more that a few of us might take his words with the same liberal pinch of salt that we so often apply to a politician’s promises – we would think that we’d heard it all before. We would think... he wants something from us, but he will not deliver his promises.

Yet... what if he can deliver? What if he really can deliver his manifesto? What then?

The point of Advent is that the Church celebrates his coming, not just as the baby whose birth we celebrate at Christmas, but as the one who has been sent by God to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to let the broken victims go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, he comes as the one who has been sent to bring God down to earth and into the midst of human experience, he comes to share our frail flesh, our birth, our life, our death, and to lead us to God. Not only that – and here we must be careful in all our talk about him coming into the world not to miss the point of it all – not only that, but he who has been sent by God to carry out that mission of compassion in his turn sends us, sends you and me, to complete these tasks.

There is an essential connection in the Gospels between Jesus himself being sent by God to fulfil a mission and Jesus sending out his followers, both then and now, to complete in every day and age the task he began in Galilee long ago.

At times it can be far too easy to cocoon the message of Christmas in layer upon layer of sentimentality. As we remember the birth of a child, born on the margins of society, born in all the frailty and vulnerability of human birth, yet at the same time imbued with all that strong hunger for breath and life that goes hand in hand with human birth, we must not forget that in this birth almighty God comes to us and calls us to play our part in his enterprise, to be moved by the Spirit of God as he was moved by the Spirit of God and to make his manifesto our manifesto.

In saying that, I do not suggest that the ministry described in the words of Isaiah that were read by Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue comprise the whole ministry either of Jesus himself or of his Church. When we read the Gospels, and when we read the letters of Paul, we find that the ministry of Jesus and the mission of his Church are broader than that. Without doubt, the Nazareth manifesto lays down an essential area of the ministry shared by Jesus and his Church – in a sense it declares a bias for the poor that the Church should never lose sight of. Yet that bias for the poor has to be fleshed out – it has to be spelled out in practical terms.

What is good news for the poor if it does not include the alleviation of poverty and its debilitating effects on human flesh and spirit? If the preaching of the Gospel does not lead to an improvement in the conditions under which men and women live their lives, how can it be called good news? If the Church turns a blind eye to the miserable conditions under which three quarters of the world’s population live their lives and acquiesces in the exploitation of the poor, how can the Gospel it preaches be called good news? If there is a dissonance between what the Church does and says in relation to the poor, how can we expect the Gospel to be heard? It was not religion in itself but the postponement in religion of hope to another life that caused Karl Marx to call religion the opium of the masses.

The Gospel we preach and live by ought to have other consequences besides the various facets of the Nazareth manifesto, besides a bias for the poor there ought also to be what Albert Schweitzer called a reverence for creation, which includes those issues that are often referred to as green issues. According to the New Testament, it is not only mankind that longs for God, but the whole of creation longs for him.

In our time, Christianity has often lost sight of the connections that are made in the New Testament, at least in outline, between the destiny of mankind and the goal of creation. Perhaps the vision of the seer of Patmos is too radical when he declares in the book of Revelation, ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth.’

In its appropriation of that sort of sentiment from the New Testament, Christianity has all too often been guilty of denying the importance of the created order as if the world and universe were a disposable entity. But that is not what we pray for when we pray, ‘Your Kingdom come; in earth as in heaven.’ The Christian faith is a message about the nature of human beings and the destiny of the world.  As sentient beings, as men and women who act not only out of instinct but can think about our actions, we are concerned not only with our own destiny but the destiny of our human environment. Along with the ability to think comes an awesome responsibility – human beings are God’s created co-creators (Hefner) and have been put on this earth not only for fellowship with God but so that in partnership with God nature can be nurtured to provide an appropriate environment as generation succeeds generation. It is to our shame that so many of the problems faced by the world today arise from the fact that in shaping our destiny humanity we have done so much damage to the environment.

The earth and its bounty is not simply a resource to be used up selfishly for the fulfilment of human comfort and the satisfaction of human greed. If men and women are indeed co-creators in God’s enterprise they must learn to act with responsibility towards the environment, so that future generations can enjoy the fulness of life and fulfil their calling as co-creators with God.

Perhaps for some the bove discussion of the Advent hope has taken us in a surprising direction. In discussing that hope in terms of a bias for the poor on the one hand and a reverence of creation on the other, we have discovered that, to be genuine, hope must never be merely passive – a wishful thinking – but should always be active, active on behalf of others in our own time and all the others who in the future will carry on the hope once we are gone. In that sense there is a continuous stream of hope that finds expression in the words of the prophet, that is given concrete expression in the ministry of Jesus, and is passed on to us so that we might share in that ministry – and share too in the processes of creating and sustaining the ecology of the world – before passing on that hope to future generations.

If Advent is a time of promise and preparation, as I believe it should be, it fulfils its function best when it takes up our wishful thinking and by the grace of God turns it into compassionate and constructive activity for the benefit of others and for the benefit of the environment .