2nd Advent, 1997 (#2)

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2nd Sunday of Advent, 1997 (#2)

What do I long for?

I think that one of the largest problems with trying to make sense of Advent, and spending it as a time of expectation, is not so much the commercialization of Christmas or its anticipation it, for example, with the endless carols that have been sung now for weeks in the malls. Instead, the larger problem is based on the fact that our lives have become so harried, frantic, and frenetic at this time of the year that we really do not have a chance to sit and seriously ask ourselves, "What is it that we really are longing for? What is it that our hearts really want?" The readings for today, and all through Lent, have the same kind of direction because they are all filled with promissory figures. For example, we observe Baruch writing in the sixth century about all these promises: "Jerusalem is going to stand on the height, and your children are going to be gathered and rejoicing that God has remembered them, and God is going to lower the hills and fill up the valleys". And then Paul talks about his confidence about what God is going to do for people to transform them so that they would love more and more fully. And then, of course, John the Baptist is famous precisely because as a promissory figure who is constantly talking about the Advent of the Kingdom and this mysterious figure who is going to help to bring in the Kingdom. So, we have all of these promissory figures, but I think in order to figure out what it is that they are promising it is really important that these texts be understood, beneath their surface meanings, I mean, their historical setting is the source and determinant of their meaning.

Baruch was writing at a time when Jerusalem had been destroyed by the armies of Babylon. The Temple, the most sacred place for the Jews, and the whole city, had been looted and sacked, and most of the important people of the city had been deported back to Babylon. And so there is this dark and gloomy context, out of which all of this glory is supposed to come. This situation looks totally hopeless.

Paul wrote the Letter to the Philippians when he was in jail, fully expecting to receive a death-sentence. Yet he makes all of his promises out of that darkness. And strangely enough, it is the most buoyant and exuberant of all of the Pauline letters. The word "joy" appears more in the Letter to the Philippians than in any of the other letters, but, he is writing from this absolutely desperate situation.

When John the Baptist was talking about the coming of the Kingdom of God this looked utterly hopeless as well, because Palestine was not an independent state. The Jews had not been independent for most of their history. They were an occupied people, the Romans were in charge in this case. So, when John the Baptist talks about repenting because the Kingdom of God is at hand he was making statements that sounded really strange because the situation was really quite dark there too.

With this in mind, we can at least get some idea of the structure of hope. Hope, in the biblical sense, arises out of a situation of absolute hopelessness. There is no Jerusalem. Paul has no future, for all practical purposes. The kinds of things that John is saying are certainly very politically dangerous and seem to be feckless sorts of remarks. I think it is important to keep this in mind because I think that our expectations, as Christians, are really, often enough, fairly cheap. We are in charge in our world, we are the majority. This may, however, be changing fairly drastically but we are now still the majority. We are not in the situation of these Jews: Paul, John the Baptist, and Baruch. And so what we have in this situation, among other things, is another instance of how we Christians have walked away far too easily from our own Jewish past, which indeed is our past. And if we can go back to that past then we might be better prepared to approach the questions, "What is it my heart really wants? What do I long for? What am I yearning for?". I say this because we seem to be in possession of everything and, therefore, our hopes, often enough, are fairly trivial and have very little to do with what the biblical promises are about, or they are fairly cheap versions of them.

As I previously said, we have lost much of our own Jewishness, which should be ours, because God is still the god of the Jews today. And the characteristic trait of the Jews through most of their history was this terrible sense of homelessness. They did not have a place that was their own. Nor did Jesus. For example, if we are to take Luke and Matthew's Gospels' seriously we must pay attention when Jesus says, "Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests and I don't have any place that is my own". So again, the question becomes, "What can I hope for and where do I hope from?". I think this is the larger issue, as we hope for things that do not have a whole lot to do with the Gospel. Our hopes do not cost us very much, just as being a Christian does not cost us very much. I have been doing my priestly duties for thirty-five years and being a priest has not cost me much. I used to get discounts at clothing stores, or clergy discounts on books, and I can avoid traffic tickets or speeding tickets. If that is the world that we live in as Christians, is it surprising that our hopes are unclear, or at least incongruous with the hopes that are expressed in these biblical texts? Where are we homeless? We are homeless, I believe. But do we even advert to the shape of our homelessness out of a real hope in God, and not just that hope in the upturn of the economy, or a change of political administrations, or a happy prognosis from a doctor.

So, what am I getting at? I do not think that we hope very well because I do not think we have examined very closely what it is we long for most deeply. And I think we have not done this because the only occasion that is going to cause us to do this is this terrible sense of uprooting and homelessness that is present in these three readings, because what those people were driven to was a real hope in God, or what God can do to us, for us, and with us. This is what the preparation for Christmas, for Advent, is all about. So again, we have a really important chance to ask ourselves the questions, "What do I expect? What do I really want?".

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RT 21/12/97