Odysseus for Advent
Advent 3, 16th December, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
The story of Odysseus returning to his homeland in Ithaca, the tiny kingdom
in which he was the head, after the fall of Troy, is one with which I expect
most of us are in some way familiar. It is a return journey fraught with all
kinds of obstacles that threaten to completely derail it. We may have read the
complete classical account in a translation of Homer's Odyssey, or we
may have come across episodes of it in other contexts, like the story of the
sirens against whom his sailors had to block their ears, told in one of the old
primary school grade readers; or the lotus eaters in Tennyson's poem; or
Circe, appearing in pre-Raphaelite paintings and the wonderful Bertram
Mackennal statue in the National Gallery.
Favourite elements: His wife Penelope, keeping an army of suitors at bay
by promising that she will wed once she completes the tapestry on which she
is currently at work, a tapestry which she unworks each night.
The dog Argos who alone at first recognises that the battered beggar is his
old master; and the way in which others make the same discovery – his
nurse recognising him through the scar from the boar tusk's wound; his wife
from his knowledge that their marriage bed is made from the root of an olive
tree. They recognise the hunter, the carpenter.
Broadly speaking, it is a story of a particular kind. It is one whose key
figure has gone from initial riches to rags and back to riches again, the
pauper who emerges a prince in the end because he has been one in the
beginning. Not the basic stuff of popular romances, with the sudden reversal
of roles, the hitting of the jackpot by a hero or heroine. That is an option
that consoles, or offers an escape to, those who have little to look forward to
and have little sense of their own intrinsic worth. But there is something
much more profound here. In particular, the situation at the end of the story
as he returns to find his wife surrounded by unscrupulous and relentlessly
importuning suitors, is one in which the poverty and low estate of the hero
and those close to him is a situation involving rights that have been trampled
on, injustice that must be righted. He finally violently confronts and
overcomes the suitors, restoring his wife to freedom and himself to his
rightful role in his kingdom.
Memory allows others to recognise who he is, to see beyond his unlikely
and deceptive appearance. For him, memory is a powerful catalyst. He doesn't
just think back with romantic longing as a result of the act of remembering.
Far more than that, it drives him to reform and restore, towards changing
what he finds when he gets back home, and perhaps not so much to just
restoring the old order, as raising it beyond its former level, to a height
not known before.
What, you may have been thinking for some time, has all this to do with
the Christian hope, and where is it all leading?
I want to move in two directions. The first is our Old Testament reading
from Isaiah, with its picture of a future for the people of God. In its
present setting in the great collection attributed to Isaiah, it follows a
passage about the destruction of mankind, the collapse of the old world order
and the end of a particular enemy of Israel, the Edomites. It is a picture of
restoration following judgement of a violent kind, a pattern known to Homer's
Odysseus as he enacts judgement on the suitors and cleanses his palace. The
new order that Isaiah envisages also seems to be one that moves beyond any
remembered order. Nevertheless, God's people had got thus far, through the
threat by the Edomites to destroy them, and through much else besides, because
they had a memory onto which they clung – the memory of other earlier
historical acts that they saw as signs of God, God freeing, saving and
upholding them.
In Isaiah's vision, God does more than save them from oppression and
possible destruction, as He did when He allowed them to pass through the
waters of the Red Sea, bringing deliverance from the Egyptians. Yes, there
is a highway along which they pass to return home rejoicing. But in this new
order, there are things not known before, yet consistent with God's previous
saving acts – there is bodily restoration, and a complete freedom from any
threat (no lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it.)
As is often the case with the cycle of readings that we now use, we are
invited by its compilers to connect the first, the Old Testament lesson, and
the Gospel. In combining these two particular lessons, they invite us to look
at this morning's gospel in a particular way – Jesus' instruction to
John's disciples to return to their master, describing what they see and hear,
is an invitation to describe Jesus' presence and ministry, not so much as the
restoration of a remembered original and good order, but as the presence of
something that fulfilled expectations based in hope, while at the same time
going beyond them. In other words, we are invited to conclude that hopes of
freedom from oppression and injustice, of liberation, are being fulfilled in
a way that exceeds, or is different from, previous expectations.
Secondly, and lastly, I want to say something that might appear to be a
little more general, about the way we express our hope. Among traditional
Christian claims is the statement that Jesus is the Hope of the World, and it
is towards this, embodied at Christmas, that our Advent reflections point us.
We make this claim believing it to be true. But there are different ways in
which we can express this, different courses of action and different attitudes
towards others that can be followed, depending on how we see this hope, the
hope we say is 'the hope of the world' for others, not just for us.
One is to make them all like us, in our image: at worst, to create a
religious uniformity; and both Christian and Moslem in particular among the
great monotheisms have been guilty of trying to do this, in what at times
have been ugly ways, with ugly results.
But there is another possibility: when we affirm that Jesus is the hope of
the world, this might invite us to recognise – in people of all kinds of
experience, who live in hope – something we share in common. Our Christian
past has just enough people whose faith has enabled them to be in some sense
inclusive, whose hope has embraced a wider horizon than their own immediate
and personal one, and one wider than their corporate identity. As churches,
in our corporate identity, internationally, nationally and within the wider
local community, we have many opportunities to express our oneness with others
who do not formally identify themselves as Christian, or indeed as believers
of any kind, but who are, nevertheless, people of hope. Hope is thus to be
encouraged in all who exercise hope in some way.
The two lessons on which I have focussed also remind us of the capacity to
hope for something greater in the future, an object or fulfilment at a level
we have not yet experienced. There is a recognition here that hope involves
an element of risk, a commitment to try to create a positive way for a future,
whose denouement is not just a foregone conclusion. There are many who share
in hope of this kind. I think, for example, of those who expend great effort
against what may often seem to be odds that have been stacked against them:
on various fronts, those who seek reconciliation and justice in the face of
longstanding divisions, whether on an international or a smaller scale. I
think again of those who exert great effort to reclaim some severely impaired
and damaged parts of our natural environment, in situations in which it is
still not clear whether they can be retrieved.
This is also true at a more personal individual level. Among my own circle
of acquaintance are those whom I would want to support as they exercise hope
by making every effort when the final outcome, or elements of it, are still
unclear – such as those who seriously pursue their education despite
uncertainties over future employment; those seeking or persevering in
employment in much the same way; and those who commit themselves to offering
time and patience in various kinds of personal relations.
In the end, I am suggesting that the element of hope that we believe is for
the world, is often not something new that we bring into every situation into
which we enter, as our unique contribution as Christians. The God in whom we
hope, and the hope that He represents, often already present in and with
others, is waiting for us, as well as for them, to recognise.
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