Advent 2: 5th December, 1999
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden, St Peter's Eastern Hill
A remarkable building in ancient Rome saw its doors closed only twice in a
period of almost half a century, during the reigns of the Augustus, and much
earlier, during the rule of Numa in 234 BC, the only time when the Romans did
not have troops fighting at one end or another of its territories. It was the
temple of Janus, who made Jupiter's son Saturn co-ruler with him in Italy, and
who is shown sometimes with four faces, but more often with two, a
representation often explained as being a consequence of knowledge of both past
and future, sometimes also shown holding the number 300 in one hand and 65 in
the other, to show that he presided over the passing of the year, whose first
month still bears his name in our calendar.
There is an important sense in which the followers of Jesus share something in
common with him. Perhaps we could be said to be the heirs of Janus. Like him,
we look over our shoulders at the past, and look forward with hope into the
future.
Without any awareness of the past, some sense of the sources of the present, it
is difficult for both communities and individuals to negotiate the present. It
may be difficult enough to make suitable choices even with a knowledge of the
past, but even more fraught with the danger of running on to all kinds of
hidden reefs without it. There are responses that can be better controlled if
their likely origins are understood, that otherwise may set us adrift.
We acknowledge this in many different situations, well beyond those with any
specifically spiritual context. We have rightly been reminded of the tremendous
harm done over a period of time that has only recently closed to those members
of aboriginal communities who have been forcibly severed from their cultural
roots and from direct access to close or wider family. We know too of the
damaging effects of rootlessness for people of many other cultures, and
conversely, of the importance of identifying and understanding origins for both
individuals and communities. Amateur genealogists may be the bane of librarians
and archivists, but the drive that impels their search is part of the process
of needing access to the past in order to understand the present; and for some,
it means being released from the past so as to be able to move into a future.
Christianity and the Jewish faith in which it has its roots, have indeed
contributed significantly, directly and indirectly, to certain views of the
nature of history. It is hardly an accident that a particular kind of
historical narrative first appears, not among the ancient Greeks, but in
Hebrew, in the succession narrative in Samuel. Basically, both Christian and
Jewish writers have regarded some events in a past as having special
significance, so much so that they are used to help interpret and determine the
meaning of other subsequent events. The key events are those that are
understood as signs of the presence of God. Allied with this is the belief that
the God whose presence is detected is not marked by capriciousness but by
faithfulness. It is only because we have believed this to be so, that Jewish
and Christian thinkers have been able to treat key events from our past to
interpret the present - ultimately, to help us to recognise the dimension of
God's presence now.
If we belong to a religious tradition that has generally paced a special value
on the past, a tradition that claims that God is present in and acts through
historical processes, Anglicans of our kind also belong within a stream of
Christianity that places a special value on tradition, both for this, and for
other reasons. But if there is a capacity, as I am implying, for us rightly to
regard a past or particular parts of it as having special significance, there
is also a capacity to look to the past for motives and in ways that are
questionable. One way of dealing with insecurity with a present moment, but one
that is fraught with danger, as much danger as having no past at all, is to
treat the past, or a moment within it, as a golden age, something into which we
retreat and hide. This position can end in a kind of paralysis as we face the
here and now, an avoidance of the present through fear, a paralysis that
results in a failure to welcome the future in any way.
But it is not just a matter of common sense that we should not treat the past
in this way. This is also a use of the past that is a betrayal of the past that
is at the heart of Christian tradition. Without an awareness of a past, the
future may be full of pitfalls. But we are a people dedicated to God in the
present, and a people dedicated to a God who is also ahead of us and beyond us,
a God who invites us into the future.
There are many different ways in which we have expressed this conviction. Some
are seemingly minor. One such is the point, or points, that we identify as the
beginning of the year. We have all been told that, from a Christian point of
view, the year begins today, with the commencement of the season of Advent.
There are other points in the calendar that we associate with new beginnings.
We naturally link the feast of the Resurrection at Easter with new creations,
new beginnings, and as we mark the paschal candle in the vigil, we declare that
all times and seasons are God's, inscribing the candle with the date of the
current year as we do so. We also speak of the feast of Pentecost as the
birthday of the church. While the civil new year of European cultures is
celebrated on 1 January, an inheritance from the commencement of the Roman
civil year, for much of the past 2000 years, one of several other dates has
often been regarded as the commencement of the year. In German-speaking lands,
it has been Christmas; in France and the low countries, it has been Easter; and
in English calendars, until 1752, the year commenced on 25 March, the feast of
the Annunciation, marking the conception of Jesus. A cynical response might
well be to suggest that Western Christians couldn't make up their minds as to
when they were really getting started. But all of these dates that have been
considered as the beginning of a new year in different Christian communities
are nevertheless slightly varied expressions of an underlying common attitude -
a conviction that Christian faith is one that regards new beginnings as of
paramount importance, a faith that is oriented towards the future, as much as
one inheriting a past.
I referred recently to a kind of view of the future that has also been a part
of Christian belief, a view that has the risk of becoming unbalanced in its
attitude towards the present: I am referring to the kind of conviction about
the future that has often been found in periods of great insecurity, a view
whose sights are so set on the apocalyptic end, accompanied by a divine
deliverance that is to be received in a purely passive way. This passivity, or
indeed paralysis in the present, is a consequence of the conviction that the
present is neither capable nor worthy of redemption. I also noted that this was
not the only way in which conviction about God's ultimate rule in this world
and the next could be articulated: some significant figures in the creation of
the modern city in Western Europe and North America were inspired by the vision
of the greater city of God, the New Jerusalem in Revelation, to effect
important changes in planning and development of city life in their own time -
a vision of the future moving them to change things in the present order.
If this is a case of new beginnings being initiated because of some idea of a
final end, a future to which we are moving, there is also something enshrined
in our regular round of worship that expressed for early Christians the
conviction that we are people called to a future, as well as a people who
recall the saving events of a past. It is something so easy to overlook - the
regular worship of the day we know as Sunday. To early Christians, it was
imbued with meaning connected with numbers. It could be viewed as the first day
of the week, a beginning, the celebration of the start of a new life already
begun in Jesus' resurrection on the first Easter day. But it could also be
envisaged as the symbol of a greater, endless future, the life of the world to
come, when it was counted as, and was called, the eighth day, the end of the
weekly cycle. Early Christians and their Jewish forebears, having speculated on
the Genesis crea5tion story of seven days (already interpreted not as 24-hour
periods, but as a symbol of great time spans, in this case, of 1000 years each)
- Christians and Jews held a common belief that history as we know it would be
made up of seven such 1000 year 'days', ushering in an endless new order, a
final and greater millennium. Sunday was called by early Christians the eighth
day in the conviction that already, they had a point of entry through Jesus'
resurrection into that greater future.
For us today, we need not hold to the number symbolism that was part of the
Jewish and Christian mind-frame. But we still look both to particular events in
the past to understand and find meaning in the present, and are able as a
result to embrace the future with hope, as well as with understandable
questioning. We affirm that we move towards a future of a greater and fuller
life with God, but that the greater union that we anticipate will be consistent
with the life we have already discerned in our contemplation of the life of
Jesus. That greater event is anticipated (it overarches us now) as we seek and
discern the presence of God in smaller comings in the present. And to unlock
the meaning of much of the present, we place the experiences of our lives,
whether joyful, frustrating, painful, reconciling or breaking, against the
framework of meaning offered us by what for us is past - the life, death and
Resurrection of Jesus - as we celebrate each eucharist. And we do this in the
confidence that the God who has shown Himself in these ways, and continues to
do so now, is faithful, and will continue to show Himself in the same way
beyond - it always points us, or should point us, toward a future. And in that
eucharistic context, we continue to take up the prayer of the early church that
sought for the unfolding of Jesus' greater presence, its prayer Maranatha,
Come, Lord, as we unite past and present with the future that God has for us,
saying this not only a great affirmation of the Resurrection, but of Advent:
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!
|
Views is a
publication of
St Peter's Eastern Hill, Melbourne Australia.
|
