The Second Sunday of Advent '25

In St. Petersburg, the Hermitage Museum houses Rembrandt’s iconic painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son, staged in a peaceful nook by a window overlooking the square, through which the afternoon, winter light gently breathes. It is hung at such a height that, standing before it, your head would be level with that of the prodigal. And so, looking up, against the darkened background, the face of his loving father would look down upon you, the brightest point in your vision. You could read many essays on the Christian theology of divine grace, and still perhaps miss what you could learn spending an hour alone with that painting in a sunlit corner.  

The imagination is an underappreciated and yet critically important power of the human mind. Often spoken of condescendingly as the organ of playing ‘make-believe,’ the imagination is actually our capacity to receive, explore, and anticipate how things are put together. The imagination is formed through many kinds of experiences. For instance, an experience of loss may activate the emotional response of grief, producing unpleasant feelings of fear, sorrow, and anger. This grief can shape the imagination; the ordeal can alter our sense of how the past and future are put together, leading us to anticipate that the future may be filled with opportunities to experience more loss. Our sense of what is plausible is also a function of the imagination–if left unchecked, a potent experience can constrict our whole sense of the future so that all we expect is more of the same. The imagination can also be shaped by fictional experiences, such as those we find in stories. If we ingest certain kinds of visual or narrative art, our sense of how things come together is likewise altered. This can be so powerful that even if we know such things are fictions, we can still expect them to happen in the world of facts. Just talk to anyone who has ingested too many romance novels or conspiratorial blogs. Although what the imagination produces is not factual, the truths, moral principles, stories, memories, and impressions we gather through life combine into powerful visions of what we ought to do.  

Christians have often spoken of a ‘theological imagination.’ In it, we put together a sense of who God is and how He relates to the world and our individual lives. Whatever we might profess in the Creed, our theological imagination is where our core beliefs tend to emerge, profoundly shaping how we eventually act. This is why, from the time of the Apostles, Christians have been wary about what they allow to enter and occupy their minds. In our Epistle Lesson, St. Paul draws to the attention of the Roman Church that the Scriptures are for this very purpose: “Whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we, through patience and the comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope.” Paul makes clear that what was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures remains valid for the Roman Christians. In fact, those Scriptures express the hope that the God of Israel would provide redemption for all the nations. What happened in old times was not merely a local religious phenomenon; what happened before remained true. St. Paul’s wish for the Church at Rome was that immersion in the story of God’s past faithfulness would provide ample cause for their hearts and minds to trust God confidently through their current adversities, to expect that Christ would vindicate their suffering and reward their faithfulness. By conforming their imaginations to a story in which God keeps His promises, the facts of life as they experienced them could be put together in such a way that, through them, they would live in the expectation that God would keep His promises again. 

This morning, however, we see how it is possible to refuse the hope of the Scriptures in favor of other visions. As our Lord speaks about the coming judgment on Jerusalem for its impending rejection of Him, He employs images from the Books of the Prophets. The image of the signs in the heavens and the panic on the earth comes directly from Isaiah 13, Ezekiel 32, and Joel 2. The image of our Lord coming with the clouds draws directly from Daniel 7. All of these references have precedents in the Psalms, and many of them are also significant images in the Torah. The Scriptures are intensely cross-referenced, which means that what God is doing is continuous with what He has done before. He is faithful, and His faithfulness reveals the constancy and stability of His character. As He had come to His people in times before to rescue them, riding on the clouds with signs in the heavens and on the earth, so He was doing again and would continue to do until the final judgment day. Tragically, the religious authorities of Jerusalem had become as the Egyptians of old, laying heavy burdens on those who cried out faithfully to God. By and large, Jerusalem had lost sight of the true story, and so when the justice of God came, they were not ready and met it as God’s enemies. An irony underscored this tragedy: it was through their misuse of the Scriptures that they missed out on the hope and comfort they offered. They had become merely people of the book, and in that frozen state had lost the ability to know the God of those Scriptures when He came among them. 

Today is often called Bible Sunday because in our collect we pray for the ability to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Scriptures. In other words, we pray for a continuous relationship to the Scriptures so that we might receive their gifts of patience, comfort, and hope. Through habitual and disciplined study of the Scriptures, we come to encounter the One to whom they point, Jesus Christ the Word of God. We are not, in the end, people of the book. Though Christ is known to us in the opening of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread, our destiny is to know Him, face to face, in the Resurrection. This is the Christian hope, and even Scripture and Sacrament will yield their honored places when the Lord appears. In these last days, though, as we wait for the Lord, much of our faithfulness to Him depends on which story within which we commit to live. Are we living in the story of a passing world that is given to fleeting and compulsive desires to consume and acquire, to numb and distract? Or are we living in the story of the Kingdom, into which we are invited by baptism and which crescendos with Resurrection?  

Too often, our error of imagination is in seeing the story of Christ as something to be assimilated into our story, to find some space for it, if we can, in the busyness of many concerns. The truth, though, is that we are being written into His story by being brought into His Body to share His life. In the end, our stories only become what they are when they are retold as a part of His. Here, in the Eucharist, we offer our stories into His, receiving our stories again, but in His words. Only then can we begin to see all things with an imagination enchanted again by Christ, to see Him face to face, to know Him from the deepest place of the heart. Very soon, bread and wine will be lifted up as an oblation, received again with the sound of bells (and music and incense), a sign that our Lord is coming among us for us to behold and then to receive. As Jesus said: “Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.”