NILS VON KALM says the period of Advent forces us to “live in reality, with all its messiness and uncertain promises”…
“It’s no secret that our world is in darkness tonight” – U2, The Fly
Who could deny that this Advent season sees the world in a dark place? War in the Holy Land, floods in north Queensland, and the cost of living crisis biting even harder amidst the consumerist frenzy that marks this season.
A statue of Mary holding the baby Jesus. PICTURE: Kara Gebhardt/iStockphoto
In the very city that the Saviour of the world was born, Christmas celebrations have been cancelled this year because it’s just too painful for Palestinians to celebrate with all that they’re going through.
It has been said that Christmas doesn’t have to be merry to be meaningful. And what more meaning can be found than in the hope of the One the world so desperately needs right now?
“The announcement of the birth of the Saviour of the world was met with a range of responses 2,000 years ago. It was to be the upturning of the social order, the beginning of the time long promised when all that was wrong would begin to be made right. Mary, the teenage, unwed mother of the Christ-child, probably expressed it best in what has become known as the Magnificat. “
The announcement of the birth of the Saviour of the world was met with a range of responses 2,000 years ago. It was to be the upturning of the social order, the beginning of the time long promised when all that was wrong would begin to be made right. Mary, the teenage, unwed mother of the Christ-child, probably expressed it best in what has become known as the ‘Magnificat’.
Mary’s exuberant, joy-filled cry that God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty is often met with what many ill-informed Christians would say are Marxist expressions. But they are not Marxist; they are entirely Christian.
As the Australian pastor, Steve Barrington, reminds us, Mary’s Magnificat is so subversive that it has been denounced over the years as too hot to handle by dictatorships in different parts of the world. For example:
• During the British rule in India, the singing of the Magnificat in church was prohibited because of its inflammable words. So, on the final day of British rule in India, Gandhi, who was not a Christian, requested that this song be read in all places where the British flag was being lowered.
• During the 1980s, the government of Guatemala found the ideas raised by Mary’s proclamation of God’s special concern for the poor to be so dangerous and revolutionary that the government banned any public recitation of Mary’s words.
• The dictatorship in Argentina banned Mary’s song after the Mothers of the Disappeared displayed its words on placards in the capital plaza.
The coming of the Christ-child is good news to the poor and often a threat to the rich and powerful. It signifies the coming of a God who says that if the world tells you that you are unloved, the world is wrong and that you are loved beyond comprehension.
Advent answers the deepest question of all, that of our identity. The question, “Who am I?” is changed to “Whose am I?” and the answer is that, as St Paul said in Acts 17, God is not far from any one of us. We are loved beyond comprehension.
Advent and Christmas remind us that this is what love is. It is all of the above and more, as I Corinthians 13 tells us.
At Easter, we consider the fact that Jesus died for our sins. But it is at Advent that we consider why God is even coming to this world at all. Anything God ever does is always done because of love. “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight”, as the wonderful old Christmas carol proclaims.
It is indeed no secret that the world is in darkness today. But, as a pastor of mine would sometimes say, when all seems darkness and foreboding, a little candle flickering in the corner says, “I beg to differ”. This is the hope of Advent, and it is what we wait for, the light that shines in the darkness and which the darkness does not overcome (John 1:5).
Waiting is hard. Palestinians want the war to be over now; they don’t want to wait. People suffering with mental illness want their anguish to be over now; they don’t want to wait; people waiting for flood waters to recede want dry land now. They don’t want to wait either.
Advent leaves us in the sometimes agonising tension of the ‘now and not yet’. We wait, but we wait in hope. Christian hope is not based on something which might or might not happen; it is based in fact. And in that sense, the waiting is over.
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This is what Jesus was referring to when he bestowed the blessings in his Beatitudes. He said to and of the poor, the poor in spirit, the mourning, the merciful and the peacemakers, “You are blessed now”. Your wait is over. This is the great celebration of Christmas, and it is what we anticipate during Advent.
It is why Mary could sing her song of defiance and praise, because the very child in her womb was the very One who would bring that great reversal she was singing about where the last would be first and the first would be last. It is why that very One would, in His very first sermon, say that liberty to the captives and good news being preached to the poor, and freedom for the oppressed, was happening now, and that it was all because of him.
In a dark and often despairing world, with war, illness, and fractured relationships, Advent calls us to sit in the now and not yet; it calls us to embrace uncertainty, because it is only in that uncertainty that faith can be born. Life is uncertain, and Advent reminds us of that. But it doesn’t leave us there. It gives us sure hope within that very uncertainty.
Advent forces us to face life on life’s terms; it forces us to live in reality, with all its messiness and uncertain promises. It calls us to live by faith. It provides the promise that a baby born in an occupied territory, a Middle-Eastern, brown-skinned baby of questionable parentage, born to an unwed mother in a forgotten backwater of the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, that this unlikeliest of babies, carries the hope of the world.
It can seem absurd to place all our trust in such an unlikely thing. But that is what God calls us to. And it turns out that that is how life is to be lived, in trust of this vulnerable One. Not by might, not by power, but by a little helpless baby. This is the paradox of the Gospel, that life is found in vulnerability, and victory is in surrendering.
Advent and Christmas call us to surrender to this little One, in whom is found the life we are all so desperately looking for.
