Advent 23 – 23 December 2022

Tracy Niven
Thursday 23 December 2021

Good morning,

We are putting the final touches together for tomorrow’s services of Carols by Candlelight. Usually that candlelight is in St Leonard’s Chapel, but this year we have moved the services to St Salvator’s Chapel, to allow for 1 metre social distancing between households (including extended households). There will be candlelight, and the familiar mix of readings by children and young people, congregational carols, the discovery of what’s in the stocking, and reflections from Sam and me at the different services. They start at 2 pm, 4 pm and 6 pm. We will follow government guidelines, for example in wearing face coverings. Apologies that we are not able to livestream. In previous years, the later the service, the busier it has been. These will be the last services in St Salvator’s Chapel until the first of the Candlemas Semester, on Sunday 16 January.

One of the carols we’ll be singing is Away in a manger. Here is a recording by St Salvator’s Chapel Choir from their album A Nativity Sequence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITYh714fJCg

And just to remind you which chapel to make for tomorrow, here is a rather chilly undergraduate outside St Salvator’s Chapel last winter:

So far in our St Andrews-themed Advent Calendar, we’ve encountered poets and other writers, painters and stained glass artists, sculptors and photographers, composers and musicians. But St Andrews is home also to St Mary’s College, the School of Divinity. What have our scholars and theologians written about the incarnation?

Let’s begin with Emeritus Professor Ian Bradley. His The Penguin Book of Carols (1999) gives fascinating histories of and reflections on a hundred Christmas carols. Let’s hear his thoughts on the carol mentioned above

‘Away in a Manger’ remains a firm favourite amidst all the best efforts of New Testament scholars and theologians to demythologize the Christmas story. So it should. Its sentiments, while simple, are admirable, and it expresses an altogether childish (in the best sense of the word) prayer for Jesus to stay by us.

Prof N. T. Wright, currently a Senior Editor in the School, has written multiple books explaining and exploring scripture, particularly the New Testament. In his Matthew for Everyone (2002), Tom writes of the angel’s message to Joseph:

Matthew… wants to tell us more about who Jesus was and is, in a time-honoured Jewish fashion: by his special names. The name ‘Jesus’ was a popular boys’ name at the time, being in Hebrew the same as ‘Joshua’, who brought the Israelites into the promised land after the death of Moses. Matthew sees Jesus as the one who will now complete what the law of Moses pointed to but could not of itself produce. He will rescue his people, not from slavery in Egypt, but from the slavery of sin, the ‘exile’ they have suffered not just in Babylon but in their own hearts and lives.
   By contrast, the name ‘Emmanuel’, mentioned in Isaiah 7.14 and 8.8, was not given to anyone else, perhaps because it would say more about a child than anyone would normally dare. It means ‘God with us’. Matthew’s whole gospel is framed by this theme: at the very end, Jesus promises that he will be ‘with’ his people to the close of the age (28.20). The two names together express the meaning of the story. God is present, with his people; he doesn’t ‘intervene’ from a distance, but is always active, sometimes in most unexpected ways. And God’s actions are aimed at rescuing people from a helpless plight, demanding that he take the initiative and do things people had regarded as (so to speak) inconceivable.

Finally, Donald Baillie, Professor of Systematic Theology here in the mid-twentieth century. In his lecture, Can Jesus be both God and Man?, published in the volume Out of Nazareth (1958), he writes:

Suppose God should come right into human life, in the most complete and personal way. How would that show itself? It would show itself in a life that in every thought and word and deed was completely covered with the kind of goodness that comes from God. And that is what we believe the life of Jesus was. It was, to its very depths, a life of perfect human goodness. But that is not the whole truth about it. That is never the whole truth about goodness. There is a deeper and prior truth. This was not simply Jesus: it was God. It was the life of God Himself coming into human life: as the hymn puts it, ‘God’s presence and His very self, and essence all divine.’…
   God… doesn’t wait, He seeks us, He leaves nothing undone to lead us back to Himself. He comes all the way in quest of us. And so He became incarnate in Jesus, came right into our human life and our human lot.

Yours,
Donald.

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