The First Sunday of Advent
Our readings today speak, not of God's presence, but of his absence, or at least the experience of his absence. Our first reading today is taken from Chapter 63 of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. Isaiah is no longer a young man as he was in chapter nine when his magnificent vision prompted him to cry aloud:
"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in a land of gloom, a light has shone. You have made their gladness greater, you have made their joy increase."
Isaiah is an old man who has returned with his people from exile. They returned to a city in ruin, a temple in ruin, and their lives in ruin. These were dark days for the people of Israel. And it had been a long time since anyone had seen God do mighty works. So Isaiah pours out this lament, pleading for God to "tear open the heavens" once again. He is longing for God to act. Standing in the rubble of a lost temple, amid the ruins of a lost faith, he cries out for God to be visible instead of hidden.
In verse seven, he proclaims, "For you have hidden your face from us." Earlier in verse five, he tries to blame the people's sin on God's absence, "because you hid yourself we transgressed."
This bleak passage from Isaiah is actually a great one for beginning the Advent season because it is so filled with an eagerness, a yearning for God to act. This yearning would not really be answered until the birth of Christ centuries later.
In our gospel extract, St. Mark's community had known Jesus before his death; they had expected him to return to take them with him. They dwell in that strange time between the 'Already' and the 'Not yet'. God has already been with them; he has not yet returned. But one thing is certain: the overwhelming sense of that community is the absence of God. Mark warns his community to remain alert and awake lest the arrival of their Master escapes them.
There is a far greater sense today of God's absence from the world than there is of God's presence in the world. Perhaps this has always been so; perhaps a sense of the absence of God has been a constant in human experience. His sense of absence is so obvious today that we no longer advert to it. Our great grandparents, and probably our grandparents would have been intensely conscious of the presence of God in the world and in their lives. Their everyday language reflected that consciousness. They saluted one another with benedictions, 'God bless you...' 'God save all here...'. The other side of the coin of course was that they cursed one another with a devil's vehemence.
However, our world today would not have that same consciousness of the eternal. The synthesis that existed between the nature, God and human beings has fallen apart in our day. However, this new experience of 'absence' is not as new as we might think. For example, as early as 1610, the English poet John Donne bemoaned the same development in his day:
The new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out...
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.
Today this sense of the 'absence of God' is perhaps more intense that at any time in the history of human experience. In the words of a Spanish theologian, in today's world the very question of God remains something irrelevant, or even non-existent for the great majority of people. God is missing but not missed. This is a genuinely new situation, a situation which never existed before in our world. With our young people especially, unbelief has become an inherited confusion, a severing of roots. The Australian poet James McAuley refers to them as the 'religiously disinherited', the profoundly impoverished...'
Advent speaks to this cultural desert. This first Sunday captures that vacuum, that human sense of divine absence. But it is not a hopelessness, a vast absence. Expectation rather than grief marks this season. That expectant optimism is best summed up in the last lines from the Isaiah extract today:
"And yet Lord, you are our Father;
we the clay, you the potter,
we are all the work of your hands."
So this sense of the absence of God, which is so central to contemporary human experience, is also God's creation. The season of Advent addresses this void. If we are to see the fragile light which dawns among us in Christ, we must sit awhile in the darkness. If we are to hear the songs of the angels, we must first be silent. If we are to know the presence of God, we must first sense the absence of God. If we fail to feel the pain of his absence, we will never appreciate the joy of his presence.