It
is traditional to spend time in Advent reflecting on the four great themes of
Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. These may not sound especially promising,
and yet, they are precisely what we need at this time.
Our
lives are lived in the long shadow cast by Death. This is clear to us in these days,
in which we find ourselves instantaneously connected to everyone everywhere all
at once, where a shooting – always utterly tragic – on the other side of the world
affects us all. But that shadow is not the exception that proves the rule of
human goodness. It darkens our own hearts. How often, if we are brave enough to
be honest, have we found ourselves faced with a dilemma and knowing the right
thing to do – that is, to choose faithful lovingkindness – only for our will to
die, or at least faint, in the terrible face of doing what is expedient, of
taking hold of a moment that might not come our way again? Such is the reasoning
of all temptation. Perhaps you cannot even admit it now, in the face of the
temptation to be the stronger man, the wiser woman.
But
the coming of Jesus transforms the role of death entirely. It remains part of
our daily reality, of course. But whereas before death separated us from hope,
now death prises our fingers from the life we have grasped hold of that we
could never keep, that could never, ultimately, satisfy us. From the life that is
itself a shadow, an illusion: the affair that is an outlet for our passion; the
nation made Great again by the expulsion of those who defile it by their very
being in our midst.
If
I would follow Jesus, I needs must die to self – to the false self – that he
might animate me with his life.
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