What is the Good News?
First Sunday in Advent
A few years ago, I posed this question to an Advent study group at my church: Given the tone of the Advent readings, especially the first Sunday’s, what exactly is the good news?
The 13th chapter of Mark’s gospel tells us that hard times are coming. “"But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mk 13:24-25). Next year, we get Luke’s version of this teaching: "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Lk 21:25-26.) In 2025, the three-year lectionary cycle starts over, and we hear Matthew’s version, the so-called “apocalyptic discourse”: "But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Mt 24: 36-39). (Sounds a bit like today’s headlines, doesn’t it?)
The class seemed put off by the question. Some thought the answer self-evident; (Jesus, my savior, is about to be born, of course). Some thought it an anti-Christmas question worthy of Scrooge; still others, an irreverent one. Down below you’ll find the answer I gave, which the class also deemed unsatisfactory.
Nevertheless, I still think it’s a good question, because it makes us examine our assumptions about who Jesus is and why he came. If his mission was to save his chosen people from evil and death, that is certainly good news -- if we assume that we are among the chosen. On the other hand, before we nestle ourselves in our beds, visions of sugar plums dancing in our heads, perhaps we should revisit Mary’s Magnificat:
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty. (Lk 1: 51-53).
My Sunday School class was mostly composed of people with plenty of money, some powerful, (we had a number of lawyers, several university professors, and at least two judges) and, in Episcopalian tradition, all well fed. To this group, I wondered, was the Magnificat a promise? Or a warning?
Recently, as I reflect on the catastrophic overtones of the daily news, I’ve been reading Jurgen Moltmann: a book entitled In the End – The Beginning: The Life of Hope, and an essay entitled “Watching for God” in Walking with God in a Fragile World, a collection of essays written in the aftermath of September 11. Moltmann was no stranger to catastrophe: as a teenager, he survived the bombing of Hamburg, and then he spent three years in prisoner of war camps in the United Kingdom. Moltmann points to readings such as this week’s gospel as Jesus’s warning of what we need to do: we need to watch, to be alert.
Moltmann would say that most of us misunderstand Jesus’s seemingly dire warnings. We think of the apocalyptic times to come as purely destructive, the kind we have seen all too frequently in the last 100 years: the Holocaust; reigns of terror in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere; terrorist attacks; climate change; tsunamis, Category 5 hurricanes, earthquakes, devastating drought. The list goes on and on. These catastrophes build nothing. By contrast, biblical catastrophes, Moltmann says, lead to something new and better. Noah’s faithfulness to God in the face of the flood convinces God to repent of his plan to destroy mankind, instead choosing to make a covenant with mankind and tolerate humanity with all its flaws. Nebuchadnezzar’s razing of Jerusalem led to the beginning of Judaism as we know it, centered on the law rather than the Temple. The “Golgotha catastrophe,” as Moltmann calls it, led both to the initiation of God’s future and the establishment of the Church.
These events were what Tolkien called eucatastrophes, in which a seeming disaster proves salvific rather than destructive. But it is not simply a deus ex machina, Gollum snatching the ring from Frodo but then plunging into the furnace of Mount Doom below. The kingdom of God, as Moltmann says, is “Jesus own affair,” “yet at the same time we are to be its co-creators, healing, feeding, teaching.” To be co-creators, one thing is required of us: keep awake! Watch! The gospel lessons for Advent tell us this repeatedly. “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake." (Mk 13:37). “Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man." (Lk 21:36) “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.” (Mt 24:42)
“Pray watchfully, and watch prayerfully,” Moltmann writes. Be alert to the reality of the world, not our numbed misperception of it. Understand what war in Gaza or Ukraine is really like. Understand what climate change is already doing and threatens to do. Look at people in your own town that have nowhere to sleep and think about what that would be like.
Luke’s version of the apocalyptic warning hints at this. “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Moltmann tells where redemption lies in this eucatastrophe. God’s justice heals both the oppressor and the oppressed, by salving the injuries of the victims and revealing the reality of evil to the perpetrators. Jesus’s return shines the light on all of us, and on the world. It is the light that brings reality out of the shadows that saves us.
This week’s readings are good news, because the Son of Man will return to set things right. What that means for us, however, depends on a choice each of us has to make, with eyes wide open. God’s action in the world can be missed. Only Noah and his family got on the ark. The scribes and the Pharisees missed the truth about Jesus. We can miss God’s movement in the world today, and in fact do miss it every time we ignore a panhandler on the street or buy a gadget we don’t need and then complain about being a bit skint. We are promised that we can join Jesus, if only we will. That is the good news of Advent.
The unremittingly melancholic Samuel Johnson, who spent his life worrying about the state of his own soul, was in the habit of ghostwriting sermons for London preachers of his acquaintance. One of his Advent sermons (which, sadly, I no longer can locate) asked our question of the day: what is the good news? Dr. Johnson’s answer, which did not satisfy my study group, was, “we’ve been told what we need to do.” There are no trick questions. Our role in God’s rescue mission is laid out right before us. Feed the hungry, tend to the sick, visit the prisoner. We need not solve the world’s problems by ourselves; the end of Mark 12, just before this week’s gospel, is the story of the widow’s mite. Like the widow, we must do what we can. This Sunday is the start of the church’s new year. Let doing what we can be our New Year’s resolution.