Advent IV – Isaiah 9:2, 6 - 20 December 2019

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined…

For a child has been born for us, a son given to us;

authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named

Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace…   (Isaiah 9:2, 6)

(It’s not the reading in the Lectionary – it’s the one I would have prescribed had they asked me.)  One of my earlier Advent lessons came from my mother, who was inclined to call a spade a spade, and was generally underwhelmed by ministers in pulpits all dressed up.  We were walking home from some carol service, and my mother gave a snort of derision at one of the best-known carols of all, one line of which says: But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.  Did you ever hear such silliness, she asked.  If you wanted religion demythologised, it did help to go to church with my mother.  And indeed, in our days as young students demythologising was all the rage.  We thought our faith had to be made intelligible for “the rational mind”.  The years and maturer wisdom say that the truth, the divine Logos, is not something we can ever grasp, possess, own, understand and use.  What we do is bear witness humbly to the Light we see… love, grace, mercy, incarnated, made flesh, in a baby, this child…  


Never a Christmas goes by for me these days without Thomas Hardy’s lovely poem of wistful longing (The Oxen, 1915, after Ypres and Gallipoli…):  

… I feel, if someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come, see the oxen kneel

In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

The humility necessary at Christmas begins back in Advent, as we have seen in all those poetic words of Isaiah, not with answers but with quiet longing – sharing God’s longing it may be -- the lovely German word Sehnsucht… longing, yearning, waiting, for ourselves, for our world.  On Christmas morning what we find is the veil drawn back a little, a glimpse of God... a word from God.  God was in Christ, says Paul.  In another place he says this child is the icon of the invisible God[1].  It is a glimpse of love – before we see anything that might be called powerful or majestic, before we think we have answers now to life’s questions, we have this scene of love and humility and vulnerability.  The point about the Nativity scene is that it needs nothing from us.  There is nothing we can contribute… what did he want with gold, frankincense or myrrh?  Our knowledge, our knowhow, our achievements, our plans, are all set aside.  What we bring is quiet, awed wonder and our longing, loving hearts.

(OUR FRIDAY MORNING CHRISTIAN MEDITATION GROUP IS NOW IN ABEYANCE UNTIL 7 FEBRUARY 2020.)

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[1] II Corinthians 5:19; Colossians 1:15 – “image” in the Greek is icon (ἐικων)