Rector’s Reflections
Friday 24th November 2023
Preparing for Advent
Yesterday, we looked at one of the questions raised by the Parable of Talents. You will remember that one of the slaves was frightened of his master, and so he did nothing with the gift which had been given to him – he simply buried his Talent in the ground. This prompted the question : are we also frightened of God? And if this is true, what might we do about it? God loves and cares for each one of us, and so I am sure He would not want us to be afraid of him. How might we move our lives from fearing God to loving Him? And if we love him already, how might we love him more?
Advent, like its sister season of Lent, is an opportunity for us to move from fear to love. This applies not only to our relationships with God, but also to our relationships with our fellow human beings.
Love is one of the few forces strong enough to overcome fear. But it can sometimes take an enormous about of courage to bring love into a challenging situation. Love can be misunderstood. It deliberately eschews the usual means by which human beings exert control over others, such as the use of force or the use of money or other forms of reward. Love also makes itself vulnerable : love can always be rejected.
Sometimes it is necessary for some brave person to take a risk for love: to be the first to try and bring love into a situation of pain or conflict. It is a risky course of action, which may lead nowhere at all. But it is at least a start – a beginning, a glimpse of the Kingdom of God in action.
This is what God did at the Incarnation. God decided to bring love into the world in the most dramatic way possible : He decided to take human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ, coming itn the world as a vulnerable baby.
God knew that our world is full of fear, and this is recognised in the familiar Christmas story. We think of King Herod, frightened at the thought of the birth of a new king. Human beings tend to be governed by fear, and often we are enslaved to our fears. We need to break free from fear, as individuals and as communtiies, if we are to experience God’s gift of life in all its fulness. But God knew- and knows- that we cannot release ourselves from the bonds of fear in our own strength. So God became human in Jesus Christ, to show the world the transforming power of love. It is the living example of Jesus which enables us to move from fear to love.