Thought for week - 1 December 2024

There will be signs in the sun, the moon and the stars and on the earth distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.’ In the last couple of weeks many people’s lives in England have been disturbed by floods, bringing chaos to their lives. In the time of Jesus ‘the roaring of the sea and the waves’ symbolized the collapse of our ordered world, the unleashing of destruction, an allegory of the darkness and seas unregulated by days or time during the wild, savage creation narrative in Genesis when nobody but an omnipotent God could have brought order out of chaos. Our worlds may collapse for many reasons as well, and we can seem as impotent to stop that happening as we would be faced with the immensity of a half-created universe. Our marriage may break down; we may lose our jobs, discover that we have cancer, become estranged from our children. In all of these situations, we may feel overwhelmed by disaster, and that our lives have no meaning and the waters of the flood threaten to overwhelm us, as we contemplate being for some time alone in a nation which maybe does not appear to have a social security net anymore. Then, Jesus says, ‘Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’ When we feel bowed down, Jesus tells us to stand up erect, with our heads raised, because salvation is at hand and salvation comes from the Word first spoken once the Father had laid out the foundations of the universe – once the world had been made for us to live in, He spoke the Logos, the Word of the Son, who commands us sternly to stand up, and pay attention, because the dis-order of the world is once more to be turned to the order first ordained for us. We start a new year, this is Advent, and it is a time to put our own houses in order, because we are not waiting for a turkey or baubles, but we are waiting for our salvation, and our redemption – that’s why we hear the Johannine Prologue at the end of every Mass this month, it’s our reminder of the object of our preparations.

There was a moment in the evolution of humanity when our ancestors stopped scuttling around on all fours and stood up on two feet. Homo erectus could look into the distance, and our hands were free to make tools, we were able to look further than our next meal and our own personal survival, we became able to care for that which we could not then perceive. Standing upright belongs to human dignity and human dignity is about care for all humanity, not just the bits in front of our nose, dignity is part of the Christian life. When life is hard, then we may let ourselves be bent down again, ‘weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life’, as Jesus says. And whenever tyrants have wished to destroy human dignity, they try to bring us down to the ground again, by imprisonment, forced labour, starvation and other methods of subjugation which bring us physically to exhaustion and collapse.

So when our lives collapse and lose their meanings, when we feel flattened and bowed down, Jesus invites us to stand upright, and we can do this because, the Gospel says, we will see the Son of Man coming with power and glory. This refers to the end, God’s final triumph over chaos and all that destroys human life. But more than a triumph over chaos, it’s the last battle when the creation which came out of chaos once again becomes perfect, an allegorical and real return to the garden, wet with the dew of the morning of creation once again, but with no snake to contort our minds. And it also refers to Jesus enthroned on the cross in glory. Everything was done to crush Jesus, to humiliate and bring him low, but it became a moment of glory. He was lifted up high on the cross, upright on the cross. The most ancient representations of the cross do not show a broken man, but Jesus as a king in glory, the wood of the crib of Bethlehem held Him no more effectively than did the wood of the Cross, and the end will come when both woods are but a distant memory, for the final triumph of the Cross is the new heaven and the new earth.

We can stand upright too, because in his death Christ embraced all that could crush us. He was overwhelmed by chaos; the sun was darkened, the world collapsed. But he stood upright for all of us. He brought humanity to its feet. The Lord has suffered every humiliation that flattens us, and he stands erect, lifted up by his and our Father. ‘Stand up and raise your heads’ sounds very like ‘Stand up on your own two feet’. But the English expression implies that being upright is an act of individual will-power, something we must do alone. But the Gospel invites to help each other to our feet. Peter heals the lame man outside the Temple: ‘”In the name of Jesus walk.” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up. And immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.’ Let us prepare for the coming of Christ this Advent by helping each other to our feet. The test of a true Christian love is that it makes those whom we love strong and we may share together once again, not the excuse for a party that Christmas has become, but the joy of the human dignity of standing erect, holding our heads high because once again, we have four weeks to remember that our liberation is near at hand. And that is the message the world needs to hear, and it will only hear it from you.