Season of Hope

AS THE secular year draws to a close, the Church’s year is just beginning: surely there is a lesson here!

Advent is the season when the Church looks forward, not backward. Yes, we are preparing to celebrate the birth of our Lord, but we also “wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.”  We think of the Last Things – death and judgement, hell and heaven: but it is on the last of these that we dwell with hope.

An essential element of Jewish belief – and therefore an element of Christian belief too – is the distinction to be drawn between this age or world (the olam hazeh) and the age or world to come (olam haba). This belief was forged in the traumatic experience of the Exile, following the destruction of the Holy City and its Temple, and the gradual realisation that even though Israel returned to its Land and rebuilt its Temple, at a deeper level the Exile still continued, and the definitive liberation was still to come. That is why Judaism and Christianity are religions of hope, religions of trust in the promises of God which are still to be fulfilled.

 

A new age

 

These hopes for the future are bound up with the idea of God’s eternal Sabbath, the rest which crowns the working week. In his writings, St. Anthony makes frequent reference to this eternal Sabbath, the goal of the Christian life when Christ will be all in all. It underlies what he calls the ‘anagogic’ interpretation of Scripture, that which points to the world-to-come.

The new element in Christian belief is the claim that, in the coming of Jesus Christ, the new age has already begun to dawn; yet it has not yet fully appeared, we are still waiting. Writing to Titus, St. Paul says, “The grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men... awaiting our blessed hope, the appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.” The birth, death and resurrection of Christ inaugurate the world-to-come, yet it is not yet fully come, and the present age continues as it were in parallel.

Anthony explains that the Sabbath rest is already available to us, whenever we meet the Lord in prayer. Just as Jesus came to the Apostles on Easter evening, “when the doors were shut,” so we should close the doors of our mind, shutting out all the busy-ness that distracts us, and focussing entirely on Christ. This is an aspect of hope (cf. Sermons I, 244, 256 etc).

Pope Benedict, in his wonderful encyclical on hope Spe Salvi, writes, “A first essential setting for learning hope is prayer. When no one listens to me any more, God still listens to me.” He also reminds us that, in the Bible’s testimony on hope, the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ seem often interchangeable. This is because it is only when we trust God without reserve that we are able to rely unconditionally on His promises. God never turns away from us, never abandons us – though we, alas, often turn from Him.

 

The final reward

 

Returning to what I said above about the Jewish distinction between the present age and the age to come, we should not imagine that what Israel hoped (and hopes) for is some purely spiritual ‘heaven’, totally disconnected from our present experience. Rather, it would be truer to speak of it as a resurrected earth. By the time of our Lord, belief in resurrection was well established – Martha expressed it in relation to her brother Lazarus: “I know he will rise again at the last day.” The last day of the Jewish week is, of course, the Sabbath. Martha thinks of a ‘world to come’ which is the full achievement of God’s creative work. Many Fathers of the Church made the point that (in the Genesis scheme) we are still only in the sixth day, the day God makes mankind, and the true Sabbath is still to come.

Anthony says that the Sabbath is signified, in the parable of the workers in the vineyard, by the evening when the master of the vineyard gives his workers their reward. This reward will be not just for the soul, but also for the body. It will consist in seeing God as He is, and living in perfect love and harmony with God and with one another. Our bodies will be free of their imperfections and weaknesses, and there will be harmony between soul and body too (cf. Sermons I, 30-31).

 

God’s healing

 

However, before we reach that reward, there must be judgement, one of the Last Things I mentioned earlier. Here Pope Benedict opens up a beautiful perspective. Some theologians, he says, say that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ Himself, the Judge and Saviour (for whose coming we wait ‘in joyful hope’). “The encounter with him,” he writes, “is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away... Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives becomes evident to us, there lies salvation.” His gaze and His touch heal us.

 

Star of Hope

 

We look forward with both hope and trepidation to this encounter with Christ, yet hope and joy prevail when we remember that He has already come, not in glory and majesty but as the Child of Bethlehem, the Son of Mary. He knows our humanity from the inside, He, God-made-man, has lived in the midst of our human muddle and misery. He has suffered – for us! – the torment and indignity of the Cross.

Our Pope Emeritus ended his encyclical with a passage on Mary, Star of Hope. Anthony calls her a “radiant star that enlightens the night and guides us to harbour, ‘like a glittering flame that shows forth God the King of kings.’... Whoever lacks this star is groping blindly. (Sermons, III, 294) He would surely echo Benedict: “Mother of Hope, Holy Mary Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!”