The Word of God in the Old Testament

1989 (Year A), 10 December /
Advent 2

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

When I worked in Tower Hamlets, I was asked by the MacMillan Service, that’s the Home Nursing Service of St Joseph’s Hospice, to visit a woman who was close to death. ‘Really and truly she ought to have died already,’ they said, because they’d given her enough drugs to see her off but there she lay, ‘She’s too frightened to die’, they said, ‘Because she thinks she’s committed some unforgiveable sin. ‘You go round and tell her it’s alright’.

Off I went and found this old woman – no more than skin and bones rolling around on her bed racked in pain. She was barely conscious but I told her that I was a priest, that God loved her and she was forgiven. Within minutes she had calmed down and within half an hour, as I watched, she died. Coincidence you might say, she would have died at that time anyway, well you might be right, but I suspect there is more to it than that.

The old woman I met was no doubt an extreme example, but there is within each one of us a deep-seated fear of judgement, for some there’s an overwhelming sense of sin and inadequacy. Where this comes from you will know as well as I, some of it will have been learned from our parents, some has come from people we know and the society we keep. Some, heaven help us, we’ve got from the church, after all the Bible assures us of this – ‘for in your sight no one living can be justified.’

At this present moment, the season of Advent, we are preparing for the coming of God, and the coming, so the Bible says, will bring judgement. It’s one of the constant themes in the Old Testament. The righteous will be saved and taken off to live with God; the sinful will be cast out from God’s presence and consigned to hell. So it’s an event which is at the same time longed for and yet dreaded. ‘Oh that you would tear the heavens and come down – at your presence the mountains would melt’.

People are torn between this deep longing for the reign of God to begin and the utter dread of the judgement which such a coming will bring. The result is absolute confusion; listen to part of the first reading again: ‘For you hid your face from us and gave us up to the power of our sins. And yet, Lord, you are our Father.’

You don’t need to listen to the words of the Old Testament to know the confusion; it’s there in many, many people, probably even ourselves.

I guess the old woman I met and most of the rest of us, if we were honest, would say that our vision of God contained in part some sense of an avenging angel, distant from us most of the time but prepared at certain crucial points in our lives to appear and condemn us. In this vision, God lives miles away from us most of the time, separated by all kinds of barriers. Sometimes, as it was in the Old Testament, the barriers are so great that we could never approach God on our own; we would need an intermediary, a priest maybe, to do it for us.

We prepare for a Feast which has at its heart a knowledge that God is not distant from us at all but with us eternally – for we will call his name Emanuel which means God with us. God is no longer distant. God is with us. The threatened coming, with all the awful anticipation is gone – he is here already. But the judgement remains – except now the judgement does not bring condemnation, it brings liberation, ‘he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to let broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’.

Now just think what that might mean in our lives. I have no doubt whatsoever, if we have the courage to let it, it will dramatically change them. We have not escaped the judgement, we are liberated by it. Condemnation – if there is to be any at all – comes from ourselves and our rejection of the freedom which God brings.

All this is encapsulated in a most beautiful letter written by a young man many years ago to his mother, ‘I know that the God who has kept me ever since I was born, will preserve me to the end, and give me grace that I shall live in his faith and die in his favour, and rest in his peace, and rise in the power and reign in his glory.’ AMEN