An Advent Homily
on the Themes of Advent:
Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven

Fr Geofrey Kirk | December 2002

Well, now its official. The best attended festival in the Church of England is Christmas. It overtook Easter about six years ago and has since been going from strength to strength. That may seem strange to you, in a Church which, as the recent Mind of Anglicans Survey showed, is going through a Christological Crisis, and where a third of the clergy will this Christmas be 'Dancing on the Edge' of its doctrinal implications. But consider also this: that though Christmas is the favourite feast of the unchurched, Advent, the preparation for it, is probably the most neglected and misunderstood of the Church's seasons.

To celebrate waiting in a world of instant gratification seems foolhardy enough; but it is the themes of Advent - Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven - which are the real turn-off.

Death is now an event to be postponed by all available means (and so encountered unprepared when at last it comes) Judgement is a moral impossibility in the world of non-judgemental attitudes and non-directive counselling. We are too squeamish for Hell; and too cynical for Heaven.

These facts being what they are, all we can hope for is that the Bishop of Oxford already has in preparation a book which will counsel the abandonment of Advent altogether, as inimical to pro-active evangelism and plain common sense.

And it has to be said that he would have considerable grounds for such a proposal. Even among the traditionalist clergy enthusiasm is running low. I do not expect, in what has come to be called 'The Run up to Christmas', that we shall hear much of the Advent themes on Thought of the Day. They are not, after all, Angela Tilby material.

The problem, of course, is not that those great themes have ceased to be 'relevant' (as they used to say) - rather that they have fallen into an imaginative black hole, where no contemporary imagery seems able to illuminate or communicate them. We are in search, therefore, you and I, for a 'Rebirth of Images'; The Great 'O' Antiphons and Wesley's 'Lo! He comes' are no longer enough for this jaded generation. We must put God's revelation into their debased argot.

So I will try you with four images. They may not fit, they may not do the trick; but they can do no harm.

For DEATH there is Michael Jackson. No monkish medieval fantasist could ever have dreamed up that Danse Macabre. There is a man with a fixation on childhood amounting to mawkish sentimentality; yet with so deep a dissatisfaction with his own self and with the inevitable processes of the passage of time that he can repeatedly take the knife to his own flesh in order to erase the beauty which God has given him, and deflect the destiny which he shares with all humanity. Such a man becomes - has become - both a freak and a recluse. A world which continues extravagantly to pay his wages is a world which has lost its grasp on the meaning of life, and is itself half in love with death. The grim reaper, you see, has his stranglehold yet.

For JUDGEMENT there is our Western attitude to Islam. One could be pardoned for a degree of wry amusement at the way in which Western secular liberalism - the 'your truth is as good as my truth' culture - has been taken short by the ferocity for Truth of the Muslim world. Misguided though it is or may be, that ferocity is a stern reminder that truths conflict and collide, and that away from the groves of academe and the cosy parlours of well-meaning Western bishops, people are willing (or called) to die for Truth. The rhetoric of the War on Terrorism masks a more fundamental encounter between world views and ethical systems. If your truth is as good as my truth, then in every conflict I will give way to you. But it proves not to be the case. Truth is now facing Truth, gun to gun. Death is the price of truth. And where is relativism then? If judgement is not to be now; it will most certainly be hereafter.

For HELL there is Chernobyl. Milton, you will recall, put technology in Hell. He borrowed the idea from the classical poets, who put Vulcan appropriately in the bowels of the earth. They saw In other words his diabolical characteristics.

Chernobyl (the Russian for Wormwood, be it remembered) is, in our generation, the vindication of that vision: an insight into the dark depths of the human psyche. Cherbobyl is symbolically potent. It was, as someone said at the time, an accident waiting to happen. It was not a willed action, like Hiroshima. It was, in Dickens' powerful phrase, 'nobody's fault'. It was the product of a society in which mechanisms had replaced metaphysics, and of which common humanity was the victim. Those who can forget a tragedy which reduced the landscape of Tolstoy and Pasternak to a country where no birds sing have forgotten what Hell is. Forgotten that it has always been, in Christian teaching, the wilful, but not necessarily intentional, construction of those who defy God. He does not consign them to it. They make it for themselves.

For HEAVEN there is every cheap love song that has ever been crooned. Love songs - and ninety per cent of all popular songs are love songs - are generally about the abasement of the self before the beloved. From 'Drink to me only with thine eyes' to Irving Berlin's 'You're the tops', they celebrate a moment when self-esteem is suspended and the beloved is all in all.

'You're the Coliseum; you're the Louvre Museum; you're Mickey Mouse'.

That tacky anticipation of the beatific vision, when the soul is lost in contemplation of the beauty of the Saviour, is as alive today as ever it was. You and I are entrusted with enabling the tricky the transition from Robbie Williams to Bernard of Clairvaux.

'Jesus the very though of thee with sweetness fills my breast, but sweeter far thy face to see and in thy presence rest.'

Heaven is that eternal moment when the self finds its fulfilment in the adoration of the perfectly beautiful, good and true. That is not, after all, a hard notion. We all long for it so much that the longing itself has become hackneyed.

So we must search, this Advent, for the images which will make death and judgment, hell and heaven realities to ourselves and to the men and women of our age and generation. For they have not rejected, only forgotten them.

If you and I cannot bring them to life, the people who come to our Crib Services, and our Midnight Masses will never understand Christmas (nor Easter either). For no man embraces his salvation so readily as the one who has a lively apprehension of what he is being saved from… and for.