Abstract
A small group of ordinands arrives at the eight o’clock BCP Communion service on a cold and dreary Advent Sunday. One of their number has been rostered to assist the priest that morning, but unknown to everyone except those who had travelled with him, this particular student has been up most of the night at a party where the wine has been flowing freely, and he is clearly the worse for wear. He looked an appalling shade of green and could hardly stand as he struggled to the lectern to read the lesson. But somehow he made it, and slowly started to read: “the night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying”. And as he reads, the rest of our small student group hoped no one else in the congregation had noticed the gentle rocking of the pews as we struggled to contain our uncharitable amusement at his all-too-obvious discomfort.
The contrast between the reading and his reality could hardly have been sharper. One wonders what Paul would have made of it. Perhaps he would not have been surprised; after all, he had already spent a fair bit of time criticising the Galatians and Corinthians for behaviour he felt was incompatible with the Christian life. Indeed, he seems to be doing much the same in this letter to the Romans as he pleads with a congregation he has never met to manage their affairs in a way he thinks is a more compatible with God’s transforming purpose. He first sets out his understanding of what God has done for humanity in Christ, then moves on to draw out the ethical implications of it all: what does this theology actually mean in terms of practical living?
Paul gives his answer just before this reading: the link between theology and ethics is simply love—God’s love and our response. He then starts to spell this out in terms of relationships with other people and relationships with the state. Straight after the reading, he will go further and talk about the practicalities of love in the specific community at Rome. But first, he interrupts this chain of thought to introduce a new note of urgency. Why?
Paul is nothing if not a realist. Paul knows better than the kind of romantic nonsense often heard in pulpits about the unity of the early Church. Paul knows for real that the Church is not a heroic band of outstanding saints but a community torn apart by bitter disputes and rivalries, factions competing for power and status. Against this reality, Paul writes to remind his readers that this is not exactly the kind of behaviour expected from followers of Christ. Being a Christian is not about standing up for one’s own dignity and status, but about learning to embody the logic of the cross, sacrificially giving way to one another in service to the community of faith.
So Paul interrupts his reflections on the practical implications of Christian theology to challenge and reframe our thinking. Christian ethics are not about nice people behaving in a particularly nice way to other nice people. It is about recognising the reality of our position, our own situation as deeply broken and flawed people, caught between a corrupt experience of a world heading towards oblivion and God’s reality breaking through in the resurrection of Christ. The contrast Paul draws between the two could hardly be stronger: night/day, light/darkness, decency/revelry, and so on. You can immediately sense the urgency in his voice: wake up, make up your mind. If it is true that you can tell what a person really believes from the way they behave, then what do you actually find compelling: the way of Christ or the way of the ordinary everyday world?
All of this is presented by Paul not as a one-off conversion job which sorts out things once and for all. Christians are the in-betweeners, caught in a continuous contradiction between the seductive power of a corrupt world order and the ‘hopelessly unrealistic’ aspirations of Christian hope. And usually it is no contest: the seductive power of the ordinary taken-for-granted reality we assume is normal wins every time; so much so that Karl Rahner suggests that most Christians are effectively ‘practical atheists’—we say one thing in Church, but in practice all these alleged values and beliefs seem to have little impact on the way we actually behave. In practice, Christians are virtually indistinguishable from everyone else.
Paul the realist knows all about that struggle between competing realities, which is why he insists on reframing our flawed understanding. The ‘real’ world is not ‘real’ at all, but transitory and provisional, a passing phase en route to God’s new creation, which has already started to change reality. The real world is God’s world, however much the ‘ordinary’ everyday world of experience tries to suggest otherwise.
So Christian values are always eschatological, determined by a different set of reference points, looking to the model of Christ, the fullness of God’s transforming love. Christians sit lightly with the rest of experience because they see things differently—or so Paul thinks.
Matthew seems to agree. He similarly insists on recognising the in-between nature of Christian living as followers of Christ refuse to get excited about predictions of the end of the world, and are ready instead to be taken by surprise. No one knows when God’s eschatological power will next be demonstrated, but Christians are called to be primed and ready to go, committed to serving as agents of the Holy Spirit. Like Paul, Matthew challenges us to review our priorities and remember what it is means to be an in-betweener located in a deeply flawed world but committed to an alternative vision centred on God’s hope and promise.
Resetting the agenda like this is never easy, of course, as Isaiah tends to suggest. The taken-for-granted assumption in his world seems to be that the restoration of Jerusalem means getting back to business as usual: nations looking after their own interests and bullying everyone else into submission. But God’s reality is different: God is building a new order in which nothing will be quite the same; parochial little understandings of reality are simply swept aside. Certainly, Israel will return to Zion, but so too will all the other nations attracted by God’s new reality where weapons become tools for hope and well-being. Wake up, says Paul: see what God is already doing through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is the real meaning of Advent hope.