Advent: 6 December 2022
Greetings,
A happy St Nicholas’ Day to you – einen schönen St. Nikolaustag. I hope, if you put your boots outside your door last night, they were filled with good things.
Behind today’s window in our Advent Calendar from A to Z is the letter G. G is for… Gabriel, the angel who appeared to Mary to invite her to be the mother of God’s Son.
We begin with a passage from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, who had accepted my invitation to preach in St Salvator’s Chapel on the day of her honorary graduation seven days ago, but who withdraw from this winter season of graduations – I hope she will come on a future occasion, and will give a sermon. For now, we make do with these words:
She writes like an angel… In point of fact, angels don’t write much. They record sins and the names of the damned and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.
Indeed Gabriel does say The Lord is with you to Mary, and perhaps his message was not an unmixed blessing for her. After all, she would later know sorrow at the opposition to Jesus’ teaching and life, and of the suffering and death of her son. Yet Christians believe that Gabriel’s message ushered in the most profoundly good news there could be, and so G is also for the word gospel which literally means good news.
The writer whose meditations on the meaning of the gospel have most influenced me (and so been transcribed in my box of quotations) is Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who has preached in a University Service, to celebrate our 600th anniversary. This is from The Truce of God:
[Jesus’] gospel is not a generalization about the state of things, it does not say, like one fatuous modern formula, that ‘the universe is fundamentally benevolent’. The gospel is that Jesus’ God is King, that the source of all things and the meaning of all things is what Jesus called Abba [Dad]; that his reign is at hand, that the manifestation of beauty and significance in the world is always possible and always close; and so, that we can live now under the Kingdom, in readiness and hope, alert for the vision of the Father, without abandoning the world or trivializing our history.
In another book, Resurrection, we hear a further reflection on the meaning of the gospel:
Human beings long to be reassured that they are innocent… The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, it asks us to identify, and make our own, [i.e. love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.]
Finally, in a book of meditations during the pandemic, Candle in the Dark, we read:
Jesus, says the Gospel narrative, loves ‘to the end’; he does not falter or turn away. We know this love, not because Jesus is always telling us how much he feels for us, but in the simple fact that he stays there, for us and with us.
Over and over, Williams deepens our understanding of good news, undermining any cheapening of it which does not take the reality of the world’s woes with utter seriousness, yet always holding on to and holding out God’s faithfulness to the creation born out of love.
The first sentence of Mark’s Gospel is: The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Here are the first few words of that in Latin (Initium euangelii Ihu Xpi) in the Book of Kells, the medieval illuminated Gospel-book which may have been made on Iona, and now resides in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
Yours,
Donald.