Advent and Christmas in a time of war: the Four Last Things

The ancient city of Jerusalem is bordered by two valleys, Gehenna and Kidron. The latter is also known as the Jehosophat Valley in the Old Testament. This translates as ‘Yahweh shall Judge’. The Kidron Valley is associated in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions with the physical location of the Final Judgement of all humanity. This tradition originates from the book of Joel 3:2, “I (Yahweh) will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehosophat, and I will enter into judgement with them there.’ Several times a week I run through this valley and the steepness of it certainly makes it feel like something of a trial. The vast number of graves of members of all three Abrahamic faiths there means that I am reminded every time that it is marked as a place for judgement.

I am now living through my second Advent season in a time and place of war. Last year, following the explosion of violence on October 7, came the onslaught of Israel’s forces raining down hellfire upon the people of Gaza. None of us could have imagined that 12 months later, almost half the hostages would remain in captivity, dead or alive, and that in excess of 44 000 people would have died in Gaza. Not only that, but our fears of a spreading conflict has indeed come to pass. Lebanon has also experienced something of the decimation of lives and infrastructure which has continued in Gaza virtually unbroken for fourteen months. Israel’s citizens feel that they are in a time of extreme jeopardy while Palestinians and Lebanese are dying in their thousands.

How on earth do we contemplate the season of Advent and onwards into Christmas when our hearts are so weighed down by death, destruction and fear? It might be a relief to know that the traditional themes of Advent, far from avoiding the tough issues, take us directly into the heart of them. Before the cosier, modern Advent themes of hope, peace, joy and love were introduced, Christians were prevailed upon to contemplate the ‘Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven and hell.’  That much better reflects the present reality in the Holy Land. Obviously, I’m not going to do-down love, joy, peace and hope, but the problem is the prevailing sentimentality of Christmas also bleeds into Advent. The four modern themes are important but in the present context, the traditional themes are probably ones that will resonate with people enduring the horrors of war. When the times are especially hard, our theology must be robust enough to deal with deep questions which arise from the dark heart of human nature.

When sharing my experience of living in Jerusalem over this past year of a brutal war, in which civilian deaths and deaths of women and children are continuing at horrendous levels every day, the question of where to find hope is the most persistent question. No Christian can hold on to their faith and abandon hope, but it is concerning when people rush to the comfort blanket of hope before truly taking in the awful reality of the suffering which is being endured in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon (and elsewhere, of course). Hope cannot simply be a synonym for optimism. Christian theology asserts that hope is eschatological. In other words, a belief in the victory of light over dark and life over death has to be seen in the context of the ultimate horizon. While we struggle for justice and peace in this world, in our own time, the reconciling of all things will not be fully known until the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgement takes place.

The Collect for the first Sunday of Advent invites worshippers to engage with the Advent of Christ who ‘came to us in great humility’ and also to consider he who ‘shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.’ While wisdom requires that I must fear the judgement of Christ myself, I find myself yearning for the loving and just judgement of the returning Messiah to bring divine order to the human chaos and destruction which is running amok and covered 24 hours a day on Al Jazeera. In order to contemplate hell, all that is needed is to watch the terrifying events in Gaza. One might argue that if hell is before our eyes, what need is there to bring it to mind in worship or in our spiritual reflections? In my view, it brings all of it into the orbit of God’s love and grace which ultimately redeem and reconcile all of this.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri explicates the nine circles of hell and the wicked, violent and corrupt who languish there before passing through purgatory and potentially onwards towards all the beauty of paradise. There, the encapsulating vision of eternal light and beauty entrances the poet. And he sees at the very centre of all the circles of creation is the ‘Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.’ This suggests that God’s love is the universe’s gravitational force. I did contemplate that part of my Advent reflections might be to consider who I want to place in the various circles of hell in the spirit of Dante but in the end, I decided that might not be elevating. Better to move from the Four Last Things to the Incarnation.

Every time I do my Old City run, as I take the road through the Kidron Valley, my eye is drawn to the magnificent mosaic on the west front of the Church of the Agony, in the Garden of Gethsemane. It depicts Jesus, kneeling beneath an image of God the Father, pleading to the Father for graceful judgement. To Jesus’s left, the poor and humble look to Christ with confidence. To his right, the rich and powerful ones look down, with shame. In the Valley of Judgement, we are reminded that Jesus’s Second Coming is for the Reckoning; we would all do well to beware and prepare.

As Advent proceeds seamlessly into Christmas, we are reminded that the Christ of Judgement is the same babe of Bethlehem over whom we coo and sentimentalise. This Advent, I am more aware than ever before of T S Eliot’s sober observation in the mouth of a journeying Magi,

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different;

This birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Christmas in a time of war will be infused with the focused reality of Advent’s traditional themes. In Israel and Palestine, which we can still just about manage to call the Holy Land, our celebrations are set in the context of the hell that is Gaza and images of death are never far from mind. Christ’s judgement of humanity is not some distant concept best kept to the theological wings but stands centre-stage in the void that is the world’s indifference in the face of horrors committed without restraint provoking little condemnation. But the image of heaven must ultimately prevail because the incarnation is God’s fulfilment of the promise that Light comes into the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it.