It is no longer fashionable to preach on the “Four Last Things” during Advent. Death, judgement, hell and heaven are not easy to digest for many immured in the Christmas shopping season. This may be a pity, because we are in the middle of trying to subdue a vigorous secular heresy, made up of two elements that have their place in Christianity, but have been twisted out of shape.
Secular religiosity is marked by a veneration for two things: victimhood and the “Nice”. Victimhood, once the key to interpreting the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, has been wrenched out of context and re-laid in a political and psychological framework, offering secular sanctification to those who appear to be victims of power relations.
The “Nice” involves the promise of the stroking or protecting of the delicate ego from wounds. Unaffected by awareness of selfishness, egotism or narcissism, it has become a moral absolute. Any threat to the stroking of the ego is rejected as “not-Nice”.
St Thomas More in his own profound treatise on the Last Four Things (1522) warns against the lure of the counterfeit and in particular counterfeit pleasure. But there are other counterfeits, in particular counterfeit values. Defending the pride and self-asserted virtue of the ego at all costs involves counterfeit values.
What antidote does Christmas bring to the self-delusion of our pampered egotistical culture?
It is not just the Freudian slip that unmasks the hidden motivations. The use of language often unmasks the inner preferences. So no one dies nowadays, they only pass. There is no confrontation with the dead body for the state will tidy that away. There are enormous efforts made to postpose death, but few to face it and interpret it. Death is the greatest rebuke to our hubris and the self-delusion of our self-sufficiency. There are almost no lengths people will not go to in order to avoid facing what it tells us about our faux-moral and physical independence.
Judgement has been neutered. The emergence of the ubiquitous personal truth – “my truth” – threatens to water down and dissolve any recognition of moral absolutes. The prospect of being answerable at the end of life to the purest moral examination and amending our choices accordingly is fast disappearing. This is not just a matter of self-delusion or mass delusion. It is a serious threat to the existence of the recognition of existence of moral virtue. If there are no universal values because there is nothing we are accountable to beyond our own delusory self-perceptions, then our sense of shared humanity suffers a grievous blow.
And yet, there is a powerful universal longing for justice. Only the promise of the last judgement can fulfil this profound universal need, which may be one of the few things that can be appealed to in order to re-gain recognition of our shared humanity. The universal longing for justice may be the only antidote to the unsustainable solipsism we are drowning in. Scared of offending people as the Church so often is, in the same way that a doctor has the responsibility for telling the truth about facing a terminal disease, there is an element of having to risk being cruel to be kind.
And yet it is not a cruelty to warn people that each of us are accountable for the gift of freedom we have been given and which all of us have misused. It is the only thing that confers dignity in an otherwise moral state of anarchy.
Hell is strictly taboo. Worse than that, to warn people of the prospect of hell has become a hate crime as too many brave and intrepid street evangelists have found to their cost. How is it possible that a good God could condemn any of his creatures to alienation?
Acres of philosophical ink have been spilt over this. The place I go to for the greatest comfort in the face of this predicament is the English mystic Julian of Norwich.
In one of her ‘Shewings’ she confronts our Lord with the deeper question that underlies all the others.
“How could you have dared to take the risk of creating and offering free will in the for-knowledge that it would go wrong, and issue out in pain, suffering and even hell?”
Jesus responds enigmatically but hopefully. He promises an act on the last day which will by a process of inversion bring the greatest joy and glory from the most grievous sin, disaster and rebellion. It can’t be rationally explained this side of our mortality, but requires trust. (St Paul touches on this when he asks the rhetorical question “shall we sin that grace may abound? In Romans 6.1 .)
And yet, those who remind us that hell is an imposition from our side more than from God’s in judgment, do so by reminding us that pride and impurity find forgiveness and purity a gross violation of rebellious personal autonomy. Nothing enrages impenitence more than the offer of forgiveness which always implies there is a misdemeanour that needs confronting. Hell would appear to be a choice – from our side.
The promise of heaven beyond the confines of the entropy of slowly dying time and space is the rebuke to the illusory promise of “peace in our time”. There can be no possibility of peace and reconciliation between people if we take seriously the wound of original sin. Those who promise peace, justice and parity on the political and social dimensions do so only by pretending that human goodness is sufficient to overcome our flaws. They ignore the reality, that the price paid for our human freedom is an addiction to perversity, disorder and evil. Freedom of (poorly judged) choice gives birth to our self-imposed alienation from that which is most pure and most beautiful.
CS Lewis was at his best when he reminded us that our aesthetic, intellectual and romantic longing is rooted in the reality of God, and not in what we can create for ourselves. “Sehnsucht”, longing for all that is beautiful and good, is an appetite that God has given us to keep us hungry for heaven.
Inclusivity is the deceptive mantra intended to keep us immune from the freedom Jesus was born to bring. Where freedom of choice has led us into blind alleys and self-harm, Jesus comes to separate darkness from light, evil from good, offence from justice, vengeance from forgiveness, those who want to remain lost from those who are desperate to be forgiven and found. It is in separation that our sight is restored. It is in division that we are set free from false appetites of pleasure and counterfeit values.
Advent is a time of promise and an antidote to despair. It is the time to contemplate the hard realities of our approaching deaths, the judgement that reassures us there is justice at the heart of the created order, the danger of choosing hell and the happiness of heaven that the incarnation made possible and gifted us. Without Advent there can be no true Feast of the Incarnation. Only the truth can set us free.
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