Advent Reflection: hope in fearful times

This reflection for the first week of Advent will invite you to consider 3 important questions: In what do I hope? On what do I depend? What do I love most?

 

I wonder how hollow the Advent call to hope sounds to you. I suspect for many of us, the invitation to muster up some hope feels like a herculean effort.

It certainly feels to me like the world has given up on hope. The idea that it’s a harsh, unfair, unjust and brutal place is nothing new. The relish with which we seem addicted to fear, however, seems to have stepped up several gears over an alarmingly short period of time.

We face an absolute bombardment of fear narratives. With almost jubilant zeal, we’re told to be terrified of everything. We’re told that the latest Covid variant is a threat, despite knowing nothing about it. We’re told to live in a state of constant existential angst about the future of humanity because of the climate. We’re told by identity politics proponents that our society functions on the oppression of whole segments of the population by other whole segments of the population. To call anyone’s self-determined truth out is described, at best, as gaslighting, and at worst as erasing them. On and on the relentless bleakness goes!

 

Can Advent, the waiting in hope for Christ’s coming into the world, speak to a world so drunk on fear and so marred in polarisation and resentment? I think that it can. You see, Advent doesn’t just invite us into a vague notion of hope, but it tells us what we can hope for. It offers us a genuinely compelling, competing narrative – a story of genuinely cosmic gravitas big enough to fill the gaping vacuum into which fear narratives seek their foothold.

Evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins has popularised the concept of ideas behaving like viruses. Whilst I dislike his shallow application of this to religion, I see his point. Fear narratives work like viruses. A virus invades a host cell, changing its behaviour so that the cell becomes a production line for the virus. Its job now is, in effect, to do whatever the virus wants.

Fear narratives work on our hopes in exactly the same way. Consumed with the threat, the object of our hope is changed. Now, our greatest hope becomes an escape from the threat. What we hope for, in turn, commands our focus, and what commands our focus commands what we do and what we strive for.

And so with our hopes pinned on escaping our fears, we reach out in a state of infantilised certainty for reassurance. And there’s always someone waiting in the wings to give it to us with the right things to say, do, think, even to wear. We are given solutions to pacify and comfort us, which in our broken state we readily accept. We open our mouths wide, eagerly awaiting the spoon which will feed us the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) medicine to bring us some momentary relief.

Are you enslaved to narratives of fear? Is your life – are your hopes, ruled by that which you fear? It’s time to ask ourselves during Advent, “In what do I hope? Where is the direction of my hope leading me?”

 

What fear narratives can teach us, if we really understand them, is just how acute our psychological need for dependable foundations is. Our vain obsession with being in control, of being gods of our own universe, runs so counter to how we actually function at the psychological level.

The great wisdom of Christianity, in contrast, invites us instead to consider carefully what it is to which we are ultimately prepared to surrender. We need to submit to something, to anchor ourselves to something bigger than us. We need to consider, in short, what the rock on which we will build our lives is to be. And so we have a second question which we must ask ourselves: “On what do I depend? IS my rock a solid foundation?”

 

Christianity has a clear answer as to what we should depend upon: God! The scripture readings for the opening Sunday of Advent, present to us the promise, articulated through the prophet Jeremiah (33:14-16), of God’s deliverance to Israel and Judah.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfil the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.”

The reference to Jerusalem is really important here. The final humiliation by the Babylonians in capturing Israel and Judah was the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. The temple was the place where people met with God. It was the beating heart of the relationship between God and Israel, his chosen people. Nothing could symbolise God’s abject abandonment more powerfully than the destruction of the temple.

And yet Jeremiah is insisting, extraordinarily, that God is going to bring deliverance and restoration. Even more staggeringly, this will come from the line of King David, despite the fact that it is the subsequent generations of David’s line whose godless rule has wrought the tragedy of exile upon Israel and Judah.

 

We know, of course, that this deliverance, arriving centuries later, is Jesus Christ, God’s own son. Yet the gospels also tell us that despite the long anticipation, when the messiah came, he was not recognised, and was ultimately put to death as a common criminal.

Why was Jesus not recognised? It is because God’s deliverance didn’t come in the manner that was expected. God did not come as a kind of divine Superman, turfing out Israel’s oppressors with an extraordinary show of power and might.

When God’s revelation to humanity came, he was instead emptied of all power – an utterly helpless, defenceless infant, born to a couple with no status in a grimy stable. And it is in such a similarly powerless way that he goes on to die; even his blood, the essence of life, is drained from him on a cross.

God comes, ultimately, not to reveal his power but to reveal his absolute, unconditional love. God loves us so much that he is prepared to die for us. That is why he is not recognised when he lives on the earth, and why he is so frequently not recognised today.

Love is power’s great rival. Without it, there will always be a temptation to advance our own interests to whatever extent we can get away with it. There will always be competition for scarce resources. Without it, there will always be some idea, some utopian dream, which will rise to the top, promising us a perfect and just world. We’ve paid a heavy price already for such efforts in the past century, with the evils of Naziism and Marxism. I fear that dreams of a scientific utopia, falsely assured that we can somehow cheat death, manifested in everything from the tyrannical assault on liberty in the name of so-called public health, to fanatical environmentalism, pave the way for a future which in its own way will be suffocating, oppressive and brutal, utterly blind to the despair around which our lives will be oriented.

 

What’s more, Christianity doesn’t just command love, but shows us what the highest, most profound love is. At the last supper, Jesus told his disciples this:

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

How did Jesus love? HE loved his disciples as children of God, and that’s what Christian love is all about. Christianity uncompromisingly calls us to see in each other fellow bearers of the divine image. No matter who we are and what differences exist among us, we are to see in friend and stranger alike, another who, like us, is made in God’s image. In a world where we seem intent on destroying cohesion by pitting ourselves against each other according to the racial or sexual groupings to which we belong, we desperately need to reclaim our common humanity, united in our equality before God.

God’s nature simply is love. It’s all God knows how to do. That is why God is our most powerful antidote to ruthless power, conflict, division, hatred and neglect. That’s why the key to a life lived in true and unfailing joy cannot be found in futile attempts to mould the world according to the latest idea of perfection, but in seeking to perfect each other by abiding in God’s love and, in consequence, growing in love for one another. That is what it means, when all is said and done, to live for God and to die to self, which is Christianity’s great demand of us.

And so we must confront one more question: “What do I love most? Does it lead me towards God or away from God?”