What on earth are we waiting for? -Dec 12, 2005

The season of Advent is one of waiting in nervous anticipation for genuine hope to be made available. For Christians the shape of that hope is known to be Jesus, the man-for-others, who gives up a throne for a crib and a crown for a cross.

It is in his most vulnerable humanity (and ours) that the truth of God is known – a truth that invites us towards, but does not force upon us, transformation and community in the midst of fragmentation and contingency.

Real Advent hope is therefore realism not fantasy, a beginning not an end. The world is broken, bruised and tortured, it tells us. And so are we. Yet what lies in and beyond the terrifying freedom of the universe and its ‘thinking reeds’ is a love which embraces and sustains more than we could ever describe, a love which is available to us without fear or favour, often in the most unlikely form.

Unfortunately, fear (in the guise of violence and injustice) and favour (in the sense of tribalism and privilege) is precisely how much of the world ticks. So to embrace Advent hope is to entertain a way of life and a way of looking at the world which is profoundly counter-cultural, in the affirming sense that it requires us to expend life rather than just to consume it.

This is the unlikely Message which made total sense to those four Christian peacemakers who knowingly, foolishly, risked all to go to Iraq for the sake of justice and reconciliation.

They knew that the only life worthy of the name is one that gives without counting the cost, and which therefore produces a return beyond all economic calculation. Not that many of us are brave enough to take it that far.

As I write this, we still do not know the final fate of Norman, Tom, Jim and Harmeet, following their kidnapping by armed militants on 26 November 2005. They went to war-torn Iraq in the (doubtless trembling) confidence that God’s love is the only thing strong enough to defeat and reform our human divisions and hatreds. Yet what they and their loved ones have endured since their cruel abduction is an agony of waiting well beyond what most of us can possibly imagine.

If freed, they will be, for those who can recognise this, a sign of God’s risen life that is offered even in the darkest and most despairing corners of the earth. If they have been executed, then they shared the destiny of Jesus – whose way of favour-free love proved too much of a threat to those who would rule by the sword, whether legitimated in political or religious terms (or both), and yet who could not be contained by the dealers of death.

This too is part of Advent narrative. Not just the anticipation of a God who transcends ‘godness’ to be as weak as a baby, but a God who, invested in the fullest shape of humanity, also stands in the place of death-dealing in order to confront its causes – a God who, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer fearlessly observed from his Nazi prison cell, invites those who would follow this Jesus to identify with God’s sufferings in the world, in “the least of these my brothers and sisters”.

Therefore to be baptised into Christ is to be immersed in a life which is only made possible by embracing death in the name of the One who lives through and beyond it. No wonder, in that part of the world mired in consumption and comfort, Christianity seems such a dreadfully undesirable option.

Not, of course, that many of our churches witness to the difficult Way of Jesus – a way, and a life and a truth beyond the competition, revenge, manipulation, abuse and violence which disfigures the Body of Christ just as much as every other body (and every body politic).

No, when people reject Christian faith in the West, they mostly do so not on account of the too-demanding shape of Advent hope (there would be dignity in this), but for the much sadder reason that the church has proved too callous, evasive, foolish, superstitious and – in its own unwillingness to face the Gospel that birthed it – too un-credible.

For this reason it seems neither inappropriate not dishonest (whatever whingeing Christians might say) that the wider world has made Wallace and Gromit their new Advent Calendar icons, and has taken an over-sentimentalised version of the Christmas story to its logical commercial conclusion – an orgy of baubles, banter and bingeing.

This hedonism is, at least, un-sanctimonious. And whatever its distortions and costs, it is oddly more life-affirming than much of what goes on in church, as our graceless insecurity about sexuality makes plain.

For Jesus, we may recall, enjoyed the company of publicans and sinners, those archetypal office revellers, and was much criticised for it. What he found more difficult to stomach was the professionally religious types – those who saw fit to judge others by their own presumed righteousness, and who offered a stifling (but empty) counterfeit of the Gospel of life.

So today the challenge for Christians is not to “claim back Christmas” (as if they owned it – or anything!) by indulging in petty squabbles with people who celebrate other faith festivals, or those who are honest enough to want a party without the sacrifice a Saviour involves.

Rather it is to welcome Jesus into a world which would kill him given half a chance, because he cannot serve the interests that those who want to grab power for themselves would force on others.

And to work out how to welcome Christ in resistance to ‘the powers’ we really do need those awkward witnesses (martyria) of Baghdad, however disturbing or crazy they may appear to have been.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com