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| Peter Bruegel The Last Judgement |
Advent I is the start of a new Christian year. The readings
are always powerfully apocalyptic – passages from Jeremiah and Luke (this year)
or Isaiah and Matthew (last year) that focus on the end of time, and the Second
Coming of Christ. Why do we begin the year by thinking about the Second Coming,
and not the First – the birth of Jesus? The answer is that the Incarnation is
NOT the start of the story of our salvation, but rather a crucial moment within
it. At the start of a new spiritual year it is essential that we bring to mind
the great cosmic sweep of time within which God acts – from Creation to
Redemption – and thereby renew our sense of the immeasurable ‘power, might and
majesty’ of the God we worship, a sense easily, and comfortably, submerged in
the more homely images of Bethlehem.
At the same time, this is not simply a matter of cosmic
theology. The task is to shape our own lives around the very same story, and to
grasp this truth -- that for each one of us Birth is the moment of creation and
Death the end of time, and that at some point in our journey from the cradle to
the grave, God comes to us in Christ as our salvation.
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| Wassily Kandinsky -- The Angel of the Last Judgment |
Advent I is also the Sunday on which Anglicans throughout
the world use Thomas Cranmer’s most enduring Collect, a prayer that he
specially composed for the first Book of
Common Prayer in 1549. It is powerful testimony to Crammer’s spiritual
gifts that this prayer has served its purpose for more than 460 years, and even
now has been retained in all the newest versions of the Prayerbook. This is because
of the incomparable way in which Cranmer uses Biblical phrases to weave
together the cosmic and the personal aspects of Advent. Arguably the most
beautiful of all his Collects, its gives us words to ask that in the time of
our mortal lives, we may come to acknowledge the astonishing humility with
which God came to visit us, and thereby find the grace to cast away the works
of darkness by which humanity is constantly tempted.
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