Advent

When we become familiar with the Consecration of the Human Being we will sooner or later discover contradictions that cannot immediately be reconciled.  Perhaps that is because our human world cannot so easily be reconciled with the divine world.  Between these two worlds there is an abyss that has to be bridged.

Now, how can you as “unworthy creature,” as the words sound in the Offertory, “worthily fulfill the Consecration of the Human Being”?  In the world of logic these two exclude each other: you are either worthy or unworthy, but not both at the same time.

Even more of a riddle is the contradiction that comes to light at the time of Advent.  The service speaks then about hopeful expectation.  Expectation is the key word in the weeks before Christmas; four times does this word sound in the epistle and insert of the service.

And in the same weeks the apocalyptic Gospel reading speaks of “fear and expectation of what is breaking in upon the whole earth.” (Luke 21:26)  Fear, helplessness, oppression, despair—in many different ways Christ lets us know that we, all of humanity, have to go through the eye of the needle.  The initiation of humanity is another name for this path.  All ways to the future go through the eye of the needle, across the threshold.

On a very small scale, as a prelude to this future, in the Consecration of the Human Being we cross the threshold every time, in order then to come back again to the here and now.  And there, past the threshold, past all fearful expectation of what shall happen to us, a world is awaiting us in which all our hopeful expectation finds its purpose.

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 1, 2024