BILLTESKA

Each season of the Church year emphasizes a part of sacred reality ~ another side of the truth that God is Love, that God reigns, and that all is well. Advent emphasizes the radical, insane nature of this hope. All evidence points to the contrary. “People fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming on the earth.” But we are to rejoice ~ even in these, the worst of times ~ to rejoice and give thanks, to “stand up and raise [our] heads, because [our] redemption is drawing near.”

To redeem is to buy back. In the case of a slave, it means to set free, and that’s what it means here: the liberation of humanity and the cosmos, the Victory of life over death, of light over darkness. The Victor is invincible and He is a human being ~ the One like unto a Son of Man of Daniel’s night visions, the One to Whom the Ancient of Days gives dominion and glory and kingship, the One Who comes in clouds of glory, surrounded by the Holy Angels.

According to the Holy Prophet Zechariah, His feet shall stand upon the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east. This is a very specific geographical detail, and if you go to Jerusalem, you can go up on the ridge called the Mount of Olives and you will see that it is covered with cemeteries. That’s because believers of all three Abrahamic faiths want to await the Advent of the Lord in the place where He will stand just before His entry into Jerusalem to inaugurate His Reign on earth. As you look west over the cemeteries and the Kidron valley to the city wall beyond and the Dome of the Rock that stands where the old Temple once stood, you can make out in the eastern wall a huge, bricked-up arch. This is called the Golden Gate, because it is thought to be the portal of the Messiah on the Day of Battle.

What battle? Some modern literalists understand it as an actual military conflict between historical powers; but according to the Apocalypse, that great conflict is scheduled to occur somewhere else: up north on the Plain of Jezreel, outside Haifa near a place called Megiddo. This Armageddon of the apocalyptic vision was the site of a good many cataclysmic battles in ancient times. Anyway, apocalyptic literalism is always a dead-end. The battle about to be joined by the Son of Man standing on the Mount of Olives is something else, another kind of struggle, something even bigger than a fight to the death between two great armies. The military imagery of Zechariah’s prophecy shows the influence of Zoroastrianism ~ maybe even of its offshoot, Mithraism. It is a way of expressing hope in a re-ordering of the cosmos, a restructuring of the world itself: the Mount of Olives is re-arranged, day and night are abolished, replaced by continuous Light. This End of the World is not destruction but re-creation, the final Victory of Light and Life ~ overflowing Life.

Living waters shall flow out of Jerusalem, half of them to the Eastern Sea and half of them to the Western Sea; it shall continue summer as in winter. And the LORD will become King over all the earth; on that Day the LORD will be one and His Name one.

One Christian interpretation of these passages is called realized eschatology. (Eschatology being the department of theology that covers the end of the world, this means that the predicted end of the world has already happened: that it has been realized.) The Son of Man has already stood upon the Mount of Olives, where He directed His disciples to go find the colt of an ass, which He then rode through the Golden Gate up into the Temple, accepting the shouts of messianic greeting: Hosanna to the Son of David. Later, He would sweat blood in the dark garden down the mountain a bit, before He was led again through the gate to His trial before the High Priest.

On the other side of the Temple Mount there is another ridge called Mount Zion, which lies before Jerusalem to the West. On one end of it, in a high place called Golgotha, the final Victory was won. From the Victor’s throne flowed Blood and Water: Living Water to the east and to the west. Redemption has occurred, Living Water flows out of Jerusalem, and history is over, according to realized eschatology. All the centuries since then are insignificant, adding nothing of importance to the Divine Comedy. Just more souls, more lives, more persons to enjoy God forever. This was ~ more or less ~ the Medieval view.

Modern consciousness has a renewed interest in an apocalyptic future, however. This interest has a well-known vulgar, fundamentalist form and a more sophisticated scientific (some might say pseudo-scientific) form. Fundamentalism takes it all literally, tries to parse the visionary, almost hallucinatory images and to calculate the day and the hour. Modern secular thought, on the other hand, has the notion of progress. The powerful idea that human events ~ and even natural processes, such as evolution ~ are a theater for meaningful change and improvement from one level to another is very much with us. It is silly to say that it died with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Much as the so-called postmodernists want to expunge any hint of progressivism from scientific thinking, I doubt that human beings will ever stop hoping for a better day, a better future for their children. The hope that a better world is possible can be traced to the apocalyptic consciousness of late post-Exilic Judaism and early Christianity: tomorrow does not have to be a repeat of today, tomorrow can be utterly different and unimaginably better. No darkness, only continuous light, and the defeat of death itself ~ drowned like Pharaoh’s army in the flood of living waters issuing from Jerusalem.

The great collect for today, the First Sunday of the Church year, calls us to clothe ourselves in the light of this hope, as though it were armor for the battle; to cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. This is not an exhortation to moral rectitude, but a call to higher consciousness; a call to resist the despair that comes with thinking that things are as they seem; to cast away the darkness that can only observe the fact that things are getting steadily worse; a call to repent, to change our mind about the nature of reality, and to recognize that natural process of decay and death ~ the law of entropy which decrees that everything is running down to an ultimately motionless stasis ~ is not the lord of the universe; and a call to rejoice in the signs of even the worst of times as one rejoices in the green buds of a fruit tree in the Spring; a call to recognize that Redemption is not something that comes out of the nature unfolding in a historical, or biological or any other kind of process, but from the Love of God; and a call to stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing nigh.