This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
This weekend I felt the joy of a baby’s birth – on the same day as a friend was bereaved. The emotions provoked by both are powerful. The end of a pregnancy brings the beginning of a new life and family; the end of a life feels like a closure.
At times like this I look for visual symbols, not just words. When Emmanuel Macron watched the flames rising from the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and promised it would be rebuilt in five years, I thought he was just being impracticably emotional; last week he walked around it ahead of its official re-opening later this week. And, etched on my own mind from April 2019 is the stark photograph of a charred cross standing on a ruined altar while smoke silently ascended around it – a defiant image whispering (not shouting) that destruction is not the end of the matter.
The image is powerful because it evokes more than words can capture. Like the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, about to be led into exile for the rest of his life, who buys a field in his homeland. An act – not just an expression – of hope.
Yesterday the Christian church began the season of Advent. This gives us four weeks of waiting for Christmas. Not an empty waiting – a sort of hanging around for someone else to do something to make everything better, but an active waiting. Advent invites us to examine ourselves and be rightly dis-illusioned, closing down fantasy and facing the mixed realities of life in the world. Adventfaith strips away illusions and draws us into the messiness where we have tostay awhile.
The poet RS Thomas captured this beautifully in the phrase: “The meaning is in the waiting”. This involves active reflection, active change, and – perhaps the most challenging bit – a willingness to look at God, the world and ourselvesthrough a renewed lens.
The people of Jesus’s time had been longing for centuries for deliverance from oppression under the jackboot of the Roman Empire. In a world which sees power in terms of inevitable violence and win-lose struggle, the dream is for a messiah who will sort it all out. And if that is what they are looking for, then the image of a vulnerable baby being hunted by a paranoid ruler might disappoint their expectations.
In other words, Advent is a time for opening up our looking and seeing and thinking about hope, not fantasy. It means being open to seeing the surprising power of God coming among us as one of us … in the midst of the real world that we all know.
