Advent: bringing majestic promises down to earth
Frontage of the Great Gate of Trinity College, Cambridge
What image of God forms your gateway into Advent?
In the light of a low winter sun, the Great Gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, is as impressive an architectural statement of pure power as you are likely to see anywhere. Here, unmistakeable and unambiguous majesty and royal might are not just on display, they are flaunted to the extreme. To the person about to enter Trinity, the dominance of Edward III and Henry VIII in the college’s story is not in doubt, the statue of the latter proclaiming his regal authority as being right at the centre of its foundation in the 16th century. The sight of Henry VIII imbues a strong sense of both prescription and proscription, with the grand entrance framing expectations and providing implicit boundaries for the intellectual activity within the college during his lifetime, as assuredly as the shadow of the scaffold cast on Tower Hill served to remind those minded to stray of what lay in store, should they cross their egotistic, narcissistic and paranoid monarch.
Looking close up at the statue today, however, the pomposity of majesty looks faintly pathetic. All the trappings and trimmings of royal power, all the ostentatious regalia, can’t conceal the vulnerable chaos and manifest imperfections of the person beneath. This is all the more apparent because, many years ago, his sword was replaced with a broken chair leg and, more recently, his head was crowned with a set of pigeon-deterring spikes. Oh dear, this is satire, intended and otherwise, at its most wonderfully ego puncturing, something which would have earned a swift beheading or worse during Henry’s reign.
Close-up of statue of Henry VIII, Great Gate of Trinity College, Cambridge
I have taken this digression because the entrance to the holy season of Advent is also framed by stupendous majesty and power. To go beyond and within we have first to contend with the one who gives and guarantees the understandings, prophecies and promises which are at its core. The divine giver defines the nature of the gift and shapes our expectations. If we stay close to who God is and what God intends we will not stray or lose ourselves in false hope. Advent is the Great Gate to our faith journey as christians, and it too is rooted in ancient tradition.
Consider this well know passage from Isaiah
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. For those who lived in a land of deep shadows — light! sunbursts of light! You repopulated the nation, you expanded its joy. Oh, they’re so glad in your presence! Festival joy! The joy of a great celebration, sharing rich gifts and warm greetings.
The abuse of oppressors and cruelty of tyrants — all their whips and clubs and curses — is gone, done away with, a deliverance as surprising and sudden as Gideon’s old victory over Midian. The boots of all those invading troops, along with their shirts soaked with innocent blood, will be piled in a heap and burned, a fire that will burn for days!
For a child has been born—for us! The gift of a son — for us! He’ll take over the running of the world. His names will be: Amazing Counsellor, Strong God, Eternal Father, Prince of Wholeness.
His ruling authority will grow, and there’ll be no limits to the wholeness he brings. He’ll rule from the historic David throne over that promised kingdom. He’ll put that kingdom on a firm footing and keep it going, with fair dealing and right living, beginning now and lasting always.
Isaiah 9:2-7 The Message
At this point we enter through the antithesis of Henry’s Great Gate, for here the object of majesty is not aggrandisement of the monarch, but the liberation of all those oppressed by worldly rulers and subjugated by their authoritarian tyranny. It is about celebration, gifts and joy for ordinary people. It is about living in a society characterised and defined by wholeness, peace, fair dealing and right living. With ciphers of Henry VIII’s self-obsessed political narcissism so evident in all the geo-political tensions which beset the world today, which of us does not yearn for these ancient Advent promises to become our down to earth reality?
At the heart of Advent our expectations of God are shaped, bounded and defined by the person of Jesus Christ. He acknowledges that he is the gate, the only gate, through which we will be saved and set free.
I am the gate; whoever enters through Me will be liberated
John 10:9 The Voice
Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
Matthew 7:13-14 NRSVA
So the image I take with me into Advent is not of Henry’s ostentatious creation in brick, stone and wood, rather it is this statue cast in bronze, also to be found in Cambridge, in the forecourt of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
Bronze sculpture “These had most to give” by Lady Kathleen Scott, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge
Lady Scott, the widow of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who led the tragic British Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1912 to the South Pole, originally cast this figure in December 1922, as a memorial to the fallen of the First World War. She made a gift of the statue for the opening of the Scott Polar Institute in 1934, as a memorial to her husband and those lost with him. The inscription reads: Lux perpetua luceat eis (May everlasting light shine on them). A further inscription in Latin above the entrance to the building reads: He sought the secret of the pole but found the hidden face of God.
This beautiful and harrowing statue is as different to that of Henry VIII’s majesty as can be imagined, for here is self-giving, sacrificial vulnerability at its most stark, redolent of crucifixion. The Christ-like pose speaks of a majesty which gives everything for those whose being is the object of the divine promises of Advent: you and me, God’s beloved. On our journey through Advent we too will discover the hidden face of God once more. A down to earth God, beside us, within us and for us in Jesus. Entering through this gate we walk the narrow way of loving-kindness and justice-making trod by his disciples down the ages, a way which is costly, but so full of promise and brimming with hope when we most need it.
