Advent: 9 December 2022
Greetings,
Our Advent Calendar has reached a letter full of possibilities – J. J could be for Joseph, who was betrothed to Mary, or Jerusalem, where the Magi first travelled. But instead, let’s focus on the J whose advent is being anticipated day by day – Jesus.
There is the occasional mention of Jesus in my box of quotations in a Christmas context. Here is George Orwell, for example, lamenting increasing commercialisation of the season:
It used to interest me to see the brutal cynicism with which Christian sentiment is exploited. The touts from the Christmas card firms used to come round with their catalogues as early as June. A phrase from one of their invoices sticks in my memory. It was: ‘2 doz. Infant Jesus with rabbits.’
(‘Bookshop Memories,’ Shooting an Elephant)
But on the whole, the texts I’ve transcribed have focussed on the radical aspects of Jesus, his identity with suffering people, his teaching over and over again of self-giving. Here are two quotations from a novel called The Samurai, by the Catholic Japanese novelist Shusaku Endō:
‘My Jesus is not to be found in the palatial cathedrals. He lives among these miserable Indians…’
‘I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man’s. Because He was ugly and emaciated. He knew all there was to know about the sorrows of this world. He could not close His eyes to the grief and agony of mankind.’
As for exploring Jesus’ teaching, the Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton puts things as pungently than any theologian, in Reason, Faith and Revolution:
The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow.
But the final quote is a true-life story recounted by Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin in the Fields, by Trafalgar Square in London, about a doctor on her rounds in a ward in Malawi:
The first call was to the diarrhoea side room, a sobering array of wasted bodies and sunken eyes. The floor was wet with poorly mopped spills from bed pans. The first bay was reserved for patients with meningitis, strokes, or paraplegia. I crawled half under a bed with the house officer to show him the sensory level of a man with paraplegia. Urine seeped from the mattress on to our knees. Relatives were leaning in through the windows, anxious, listening, watching, commenting. One called across, asking me to treat his cough. I told him where to find the clinic. As we passed the nurse on her drug round, a man from the other half of the ward pulled at my coat sleeve: ‘Help me.’ The nurse told him that someone would see him later. The second bay was pneumonia, tuberculosis, jaundice. Another patient was tapping my shoulder and demanding that I help with his stomach pains. We hastened through several cases of chronic cough in the last bay and were done.
I issued a closing pep talk and turned to leave. Passing the noisy relatives, I felt an insistent tug on my coat hem. Not again! I whipped round, suddenly angry and impatient to get out. It was one of the patients on the floor in the second bay. Could he not see how hard we had worked? I didn’t bother to conceal my irritation and said, ‘I have already heard your problem. What do you want now?’ He looked up at me earnestly. ‘Nothing, doctor. You look tired. I think you can share my beans.’ He pushed his watery hospital meal on its plastic plate across the concrete floor towards me. I had seen the face of Christ. (Speaking the Truth)
The face of Christ? There are thousands of images to choose from. But here is one I’ve known from my student days in Edinburgh, which to me points to Jesus’ suffering and his infinite compassion, Christ Blessing by El Greco, in the National Galleries of Scotland.
Yours,
Donald