Mass readings for the 1st Sunday in Advent:
Jeremiah 33.14-16 Psalm 25.4-5, 8-10, 14 1 Thessalonians 3.12-4.2 Luke 21.25-28, 34-36
In today’s gospel, Jesus speaks to our fears and apprehension about the future. And it is a chilling prophecy. While today’s passage doesn’t give us the whole of what he has to say on the matter, from it we know, “…people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world.” Yet, if we listen attentively to our Lord, there is always a message of reassurance, a call to live not from fear, but from the joy we have in knowledge of our redemption through Christ. He tells us to “stand up!” We are to live on our feet, looking to heaven, eyes open in excited anticipation; it is not for us to die on our knees in fear.
But oh, how fear dominates us.
We are fearful creatures, and understandably so. Life has been pretty precarious for human beings through most of our collective existence. And as recent scholarship in the area of emotional trauma indicates, stresses that come from a struggle for survival reenforce those emotions that relate to our survival instinct generation to generation. This is to say, we inherit through biochemical processes some aspects of our ancestors’ trauma; we are heirs to fear.
A favourite movie of mine is the animated Pixar film, Inside Out. It does a good job of outlining the basic elements of the human personality: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. In the film these are characters that inhabit the mind of a little girl going through a crisis.
Through the course of the movie, the need for what appears to us as negative emotions is explained. Sadness is a necessary complement to joy; fear and disgust actually have a great deal to do with keeping us safe. Anger, however, remains the least explained, but it’s inferred that it has something to do with our survival instinct: the fight part of our “fight or flight” response to threats.
When the girl’s “Joy” goes missing, one sees what happens when the other emotional elements of personality try to guide her through her day. Both the comedy and the drama of the film come as anger, fear and disgust try to manage her situation; no surprise, they don’t do a very good job.
It’s quite interesting to apply these character elements as a lens through which to view the world around us; and I mean by that, the social world around us. To reflect on what the key emotional note is in public discussions, political rhetoric, cultural products like visual art, pop music, painting, movies and theatre. You can also do this in examining history, and pick up on how each, joy, anger, disgust, sadness and fear manifest themselves socially and pull people into adopting a common understanding, or misunderstanding of their situation.
For an extreme example, we can look at the National Socialist leader Adolph Hitler’s successful rise to power in Germany in the early 1930s. We see how he artfully played on people’s anger and fear.
It shows us how we can be so easily manipulated, especially by those elements of our emotional life that relate to self-preservation. If someone can make you fearful, angry and disgusted with the state of things, you are apt to listen to them even when there isn’t a lot of truth to what they are saying.
A recent essay in the Tablet entitled “Needle Points” by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Brian Doidge considered the great divide around the response to COVID-19. The emotional trauma of the early days of the pandemic set up a defensive mindset in people to help them cope with and survive the threat of this new disease. Doidge makes a general observation about the social psychology that is involved when a population is threatened. There is fear, obviously, but also suspicion of others; and there is loathing and disgust toward those with whom you have disagreement over how to deal with the threat. He also discusses the consequences of severe trauma and writes,
“Some take it further, and seem almost addicted to being scared, or remain caught in a kind of post-traumatic lockdown nostalgia—demanding that all the previous protections go on indefinitely, never factoring in the costs, and triggering ever more distrust. Their minds are hijacked by a primal, archaic, cognitively rigid brain circuit…” That is, they can’t stop being afraid.
Go back to 1st century Judea, the Galilee and the surrounding regions, and you’ve got a population caught up in an ongoing, centuries-long existential crisis. Jewish commentary from that time indicates that religious communities and everyday people had latched on to themes of the Hebrew Scripture such as one finds in the Book of Daniel, and the writings of prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. In these there is the promise of God’s rescue through an ultimate act of wrapping up history and establishing eternally the kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital and a son of David as its king. Certainly, among the cynical elites, including some the Sadducees, a few of the Pharisees, and likely most of those loyal to Herod and his family, this was just so much popular fantasy, but it’s a powerful fantasy they must contend with for their own survival as leaders of the community.
This was the common hope in a precarious situation; yet God seemed unmoved by their plight. Most couldn’t see God at work, but that is because God was not acting according to their expectations; and their anxieties prevented them from thinking of their liberation in anything but the conventional and familiar terms of rescue by a military and political leader. Their vision was one that came from their past, that looked to Joshua and David, great military leaders, only amplified; and so, it was a grim anticipation of a cataclysmic battle that called for stoicism, and a readiness to fight – to control fear and harness anger as energy for the final struggle.
Jesus, while it is true that he spoke of the end times and of judgement quite a bit, he was also actively trying to get people to reframe their lives away from fear and toward joy; that when the end comes, it will be nothing to those who live their lives out of the joy that comes from living by grace and trusting in God and His Word.
The people who Jesus must speak to have their minds filled with the images suggested by this idea that the only remedy for Israel is the Messiah fighting the final battle.
Jesus knows that fallen humanity will be fighting many more wars, enacting horrors for centuries yet to come. We will be people of fear; and the work of overcoming that fear by the Word of the Gospel and the working of the Holy Spirit will not be accomplished instantaneously, but is a project of Christ’s Church for generations to come.
“Be on guard that your hearts are not weighed down with… the worries of this life.” Don’t be prisoners to fear.
It’s interesting that in the 3rd century A.D., with the Jewish state smashed utterly after two failed rebellions against the Romans inspired by the understanding that their salvation would come through a warrior Messiah that Judaism is reconceived in the Mishnah. And what is striking in that the Messiah ceases to be a catalyst of history, but is re-imagined as a high priest; and there is no more anticipation of a cataclysmic end to history. Rather, the concern over history and the course of human events is diminished, and instead, the day-to-day life of progressive sanctification becomes its ethos.
I think that’s ironic because that is where Jesus was leading people already.
Our faith teaches that history matters, that it has a purpose, and so each of our lives fit into God’s scheme; and that we need not live with a sense of interminable history continuing with all its suffering and injustice. History continues, as do the wars, not as punishment by God, but as an opportunity to overcome by grace the fear and anger and disgust that has led us into so much tragedy.
History has a blessed end in God’s victory, in the triumph of justice, the redemption of the righteous. It will be by joy that we escape the distress of the nations—it’s how we will defeat our current fears, and it is by faith that we are lifted above the confusion; as we stand here today in a Catholic Church meant to evoke the idea of heaven, we remember that it is to heaven we are bound by faith through grace.
Our own St. Augustine said we “sing alleluias on Earth in our anxieties so that we might sing alleluia in heaven in full security.” We are to sing as we would a worksong to lift us up in our labour, our labour of growing in virtue, of progressing in faith, hope and love that takes us to God.
So, stand up and raise your heads, for your redemption is drawing near.So, stand up and raise your heads, for your redemption is drawing near.
Amen.