The Second Sunday before Advent, 17 November 2024, Austwick
Over the coming weeks we will no doubt find ourselves singing the words, ‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie’. It paints a lovely picture, but for some of us the words may stick in our throat because we can’t help but make the contrast with Bethlehem today, where, rather than watching ‘the silent stars go by’, the occupants lie awake at night in fear of attack by soldiers or settlers intent on forcibly removing them from their homes. [1]
Maybe Bethlehem was in a ‘deep and dreamless sleep’ when the carol’s original writer, Revd Phillips Brooks, visited there in 1865. But it is hard to imagine that was the case two thousand years earlier, when the ‘holy Child’ in his carol was born. Then, as now, Bethlehem was in occupied territory, and ‘it was the despised Roman taxation system which brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem on that first Christmas night. The census declared by Caesar Augustus was intended to identify the value of his assets in Palestine and to increase the revenue for his empire.’ [2]
So on the night when the angels kept ‘their watch of wondering love’, ‘peace to men on earth’ would have seemed a long way off for Bethlehem’s occupants. And thus, it seems apposite to approach this Advent with the words of the adult Jesus standing before the Temple and predicting its fall: ‘When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed;’ he said. ‘This must take place, but the end is still to come…’. Those words are credible, they have substance, for they speak directly to the reality of life in that land, both then and now. Furthermore they offer comfort to a people troubled by conflict and violence, in the promise of an end to all their suffering, and the whisper of a new day dawning.
Of course, you may be as unconvinced by these words of Jesus as by Philips Brooks’ carol. For, almost 2,000 years after the fall of the Jerusalem Temple, the lauded ‘end’ of all this suffering seems no nearer. What comfort is there in Jesus’ words for the present-day Palestinians? As the world continues to watch in horror the forcible removal of the Palestinian people from their land, words of comfort and hope do not come easy, nor should they.
But note carefully what Jesus is saying. In contrast to the politicians of his – and our – day, he avoids offering a short-term (and inevitably violent) ‘solution’ to the problems of his place and time. Jesus teaches of the coming kingdom of God, where change comes slowly, almost imperceptibly, like in a pregnancy. ‘Nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,’ he said. ‘There will be earthquakes; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.’
Jesus is saying that our troubled land, our aching world, is pregnant. Pregnant and expectant of the birth of a new kingdom in which war and its consequences – famines, disease – will be no more. He’s telling his followers that it is our task to nurture this new kingdom into being. We, who occupy the tension between the present, troubled, reality, and the new, transformed, world which he is bringing into being – we are to help midwife that birth, through the way we live our lives.
Those who midwife this new creation understand that good news emerges not through fierce and rapid actions, but slowly and almost unnoticed: but they trust that it is undoubtedly coming.
The midwives to this new creation know that peaceful change will come not through force, but through tiny acts of grace and love.
They understand that the world will be saved not by those who speak of themselves as heroes – “saying ‘I am the one!’’ – but through those who live modest lives, faithfully.
They put their trust in the gentle art of nurture, the patient crafting of life.
The theologian Walter Wink says that ‘Violence is the ethos of our times. It is the spirituality of the modern world.’ And so our world keeps spinning in a cycle of endless violence, of an-eye-for-an-eye, where Israel-Palestine is just one example. It happens on a different scale even in our own communities, if you think about family conflicts and neighbourhood disputes where people feel compelled to drive a wedge between themselves and others despite the damage and lasting pain this causes everyone involved.
Jesus urges us to disbelieve all rapid and dramatic solutions to the problems of the world. He encourages us to heed less the bad news which assails us from all sides, surrounds us with darkness and makes us feel impotent to change anything, and to take more time to listen to the good news which he teaches, and consider what a difference it is already making, and can in future make, in our world.
He invites us to share in the coming of the kingdom of God, which grows through a community of faith whose members encourage each other to love, and provoke each other to do good deeds, it grows whenever we do something which demonstrates our love for enemies, each time we offer prayers for those who persecute us.
Through the gentle witness of Jesus’ followers the new kingdom comes, slowly and almost silently, to all nations.
The Christian watches for signs of God’s kingdom emerging as we try to engage graciously with the hard questions of our time. The Christian is deeply privileged to be not only present at the birth of this new age in its arrival, but to be actively involved in its gestation. We are at the beginning of the birth pangs. It’s time to call the midwives.
Notes
A rewrite of Wars and rumours of wars in a pregnant world, published in Lydford Parish and Community Magazine, December 2012
In homage to the late Walter Wink, author of Engaging the Powers; Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination.
[1] Army Shoots a Palestinian Near Bethlehem, International Middle East Media Center, 3 November 2024; Israel approves new illegal settlement on UNESCO site near Bethlehem, Aljazeera, 15 August 2024.
[2] Stephen Sizer, The dark side of Christmas, 25 December 2015.
