The ‘O Antiphons’ Part Two
Well, Advent is drawing to a close and the feast of Christmas is only a few days away.
The more I though about the great Antiphons of my last posting, I though how they drew all the themes of Advent together. Most certainly they evoke the sense of longing for fulfilment and hope for a future where love and justice will reign. In this way they cry out for, what Christians call the Second Coming, or Parousia which is at the very heart of the Advent and Christmas liturgy.
These Antiphons also teach us about another advent of Christ – the coming of Christ into our lives each day. It is the petition part of the antiphons that call for God to act now. The petitions are:
Teach us the way of prudence
Redeem us
Save us
Deliver us from the chains of prison who sit in darkness and the shadow of death
Enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death
Save the poor one whom you fashion out of clay
Save us
Implicit in our very longing for Christ, is our deep sense of neediness, not just for each one of us individually, but particularly for us as the human race, in fact for all creation. We have a solidarity in incompleteness and neediness and it is from this sense of unity, that we call on God to act in our world now.
However, for all the pain and incompletion we see in our world, we do not call despairingly, we call with hope because God does teach, save, enlighten, redeem here and now. The sweep of the history of Israel taught this and for us we seen in the Incarnation God’s reaffirmation of that creative, redeeming love that evokes the great cry of the O Antiphons. The fulfilment of the Parousia will only come when we co-operate.
I call to mind an old movie, Oh God. George Burns played God and when he was asked why he didn’t do something about the suffering and evil in the world, he replied that he had given the world to us. I think this is a profound piece of theology. God takes our part in co-creating with God very, very seriously. Our loving and just deeds are the coming of God in Christ here and now, and while God takes our co-operation seriously, we are never abandoned to strive alone. God gives us the power choose, to work, to show compassion. We are co-creators with God.
The very fact that we have the insight to cry for redemption, deliverance, teaching and all those needs implies that somewhere in our hearts we know that destruction is not the norm for creation (no matter what the current world may appear to be) and that the wholeness sought will come. After all, “Would a father give his child a stone when he asks for bread”. God puts the cry into our hearts so we may know that through us God will do it.
However, the shocking thing is that it is precisely though our human agency that all God’s gifts will be given. We are given to each other to be the face of God for each other, so perhaps we can turn then to the titles of the great Antiphons and see our own faces mirrored in them – O Wisdom; O Lord and Ruler and so on so we become Emmanuel, God with us, to each other and to all creation.
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