I must confess that I love squirrels! I enjoy watching and photographing them as they run around our backyard collecting nuts and doing what comes naturally to them. But every now and again, a cat appears on the scene, and chaos ensues. I used to watch our Priory cat in Edinburgh try again and again to hunt squirrels, and thankfully Magnus never succeeded although he did bring in many birds! But no matter how much one domesticates a cat and feeds it dry food, one cannot turn it into a vegetarian non-hunting beast. The cat is just acting according to his cat nature, and this, I have to admit, is good – even if I have to clear the avian carcasses out of the priory! For although I’ve seen cats chew on grass occasionally, who has ever seen a vegetarian lion eating “hay like the ox” as Isaiah says? It’s just not natural!
And that, I think, is precisely the point. The prophet’s vision is not about what nature does but he goes beyond nature, he’s concerned about the supernatural and what God does. So, in this Advent tide, we were first awakened from slumber, and then today we’re invited to open our eyes to what God accomplishes; we’re called to see deeply into how God transforms the created order; we’re exhorted to see what God wants to do – something that surpasses the bounds of nature and our limited desires and expectations – and so to share in God’s infinitely more expansive and, humanly speaking, strange vision.
I like to think that this is what all the decorated trees and sparkling lights on street lamps and so on are about – they make visible the vital transformation of the natural order through God’s grace; they help us visualise what God’s grace does, which is to elevate the ordinary and mundane of his wonderful creation, and to make it still more beautiful by giving it a higher, more glorious end that nature unaided by grace could not attain. And Advent reminds us that you and I have been called to this supernatural end: it is the fruit of glory given to us in seed through baptism, and the “seed of eternity” is planted in us through the Eucharist.
For consider what we do every time we gather for Mass and receive the Eucharist. For as Isaiah sees lions eating hay, so St Thomas says that here “the bread of angels has become the bread of men”. This is our super-substantial bread that sustains our supernatural life day after day, as a literal reading of the Lord’s Prayer goes. This is especially evident for religious whose daily life is sustained by grace but it true of every parish community gathered for Mass today. For we gather here, a motley bunch brought together from all over the world, and with our differences and particularities, with our various idiosyncrasies and even our genuine non-essential disagreements. But even as Isaiah’s wolf and lamb, and leopard and kid, and cow and bear come together peaceably and eat together, so do we as we’re gathered in the grace of Christ, gathered at the altar of God, which is, literally, the high place of God. Here is the “holy mountain” of Isaiah’s vision. So here, we sit together as neighbours – the cow and the bear, or even the squirrel and the cat, so to speak – and we eat together, being fed on God’s Word and his Body and Blood. Christ, then, is the source of our unity. Hence the prophet’s vision comes to pass: Jesus, whose birth as a baby we celebrate in just three weeks, is the little child who guides us into the peace and harmony of God’s holy place.
We often take this amiable unity for granted, perhaps, but the Eucharist always reveals God’s grace at work in our world, transforming it and taking us beyond our human limitations because it unites us in divine charity. Unity among sinful men and women is rare, and peoples and nations are increasingly fractured and divided in our world. But we shouldn’t be surprised for economic success and political goals are no basis for lasting peace among peoples. At best these may give us a semblance of unity that accords with man’s natural desire for happiness. But true unity that transcends our cultural, racial, social, national and personal boundaries is supernatural, it is rooted in divine charity. Hence lasting unity and harmony, such as Isaiah envisions, goes beyond anything we can humanly imagine but we have a taste of it in the Eucharist. Here, we have a foretaste of the heavenly life that God promises us.
It is with this vision and call in mind that I want to situate St John the Baptist’s call to repent. For often repentance can be thought of as something unpleasantly restrictive, like foregoing Sunday brunch for locusts and wild honey instead. Or talk of repentance can sound altogether shameful and embarrassing like having to wear clothing made of camel’s hair. But I think the call to repentance is somewhat more positive – it’s genuinely progressive because it’s about forging a straight path through the desert of our sinful lives and so making a highway for God, who is, after all, the only goal worth progressing towards. For the call to repent, metanoiete, means literally to go beyond our mind or thought. This is to say, we’re called to go beyond our current mindset and merely human ways of thinking and behaving; to go beyond what nature imagines and allows and to see what marvels God’s grace accomplishes. So just as the Holy Spirit has given us faith to say that here in the Eucharist, Christ is at hand, so the Holy Spirit moves us to repentance by broadening our horizons and giving us far-sightedness so that we see what greatness God has in store for us. He desires to lift us up to heaven and so, to bring “the kingdom of God” close at hand; he wills to unite us to himself in heaven. This is why St John cries out: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” – it’s a summons to wake up, to open one’s eyes, and to share in God’s exalted vision for man, and so, let not the myopia of sin obstruct us any longer.
However, we’re thus called to be not merely spectators but participants in God’s heavenly kingdom. The Gospel says: “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance”, and this is the sticking point. This is why people prefer talk of mercy but not of repentance. For as Chesterton said: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” I suppose, one might say that the Christian life is a hard nut to crack!
But, returning to the squirrels, they don’t seem to have this problem with nuts! They’re equipped with teeth well-suited to cracking nuts – it’s proper to their nature, as squirrels, to do this whereas, it simply isn’t for us men and women, as some of us were observing over lunch yesterday. We need a nutcracker. Hence the Christian ideal, so called by Chesterton, is not a nut that we can crack with our own efforts alone. Because its goal exceeds what we can accomplish or even dream of by our own human nature. Heaven is the connatural end of the supernatural life, the life of charity lived in unity with Christ. So, if we’re to participate in Isaiah’s vision and see God’s kingdom close at hand, then we absolutely need the grace of God; we need the humility to be led by the little child of Isaiah’s vision. No wonder, then, that ‘The Nutcracker’, shaped like a man, is a popular figure during the Advent period (in Britain, at least). For the Nutcracker who cracks the hard nut of the Christian life is none other than the God who became man at Christmas. Thanks to him, man partakes in the divine nature; already here and now, men eat the bread of angels!
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