Advent Anticipation
At this time of year our gardens can look pretty bleak. In the Rectory garden all the leaves are gone off our apple tree, the roses, a lilac tree I planted to remind me of the house I grew up in in Birmingham. It all looks very bare. Earlier in the week, as I was going down to the compost heap, I looked at these apparently bare branches. On each one of them buds had formed.
There is a sense of anticipation in those buds on the trees in my garden. Much will happen between now and the promised leaves, the apples, the flowers appearing. Whatever frosts, storms, winds may come in the meantime, there is a certainty that they will come. It kind of echoes the promise to Noah that we read in Genesis, as they all come out of the Ark after the Great Flood.
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Gen 8.22
We are embarking upon the season of Advent, one of the great forgotten seasons of the Church year, that has been swamped by our preparations for Christmas. There are two sides to this season. There is a looking back to the first coming of Christ, the birth of Jesus, God coming among us in the child of Bethlehem.
There is an anticipation to Advent, a looking forward to the culmination of our faith, the coming of a Kingdom, the new heaven and the new earth.
But that is not yet. We have a life to live. We have responsibilities to ourselves, to our loved ones, to each other. We live that life, we face those responsibilities, the joys, the sorrows, the challenges in the light of our following of Christ. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. Along the way our faith is challenged by sickness, bereavement, this whole business of being human, and living alongside fellow human beings.
In our Gospel reading, our eyes are cast into the future; the writer speaks of trials and tribulations but also of future hope. In this account, Jesus is also using the illustration of buds of trees, sprouting forth their leaves. He speaks in particular of the fig tree. The fig tree is a recurring theme through out the Old Testament and in Jewish spirituality. It is the only tree specifically mentioned in the story of the Garden of Eden. It is from the fig tree that Adam and Eve take leaves to cover their nakedness. It is also among the fruits that indicate the fruitfulness of the Promised Land that the people are to enter after their slavery in Egypt, their wandering in the desert of Sinai. The prophet Micah, among others, speaks of that time when:
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. Micah 4.3,4
He speaks of a time of peace and prosperity that is God’s will for his people. By the same token, the destruction of the fig tree is a sign of the judgement that is to come on a nation that turned aside from God.
The Jewish Rabbis, in a body of writing known as the Midrash, an accumulation of teaching on the scriptures, use the fig, the gathering of figs, as a symbol of gathering from the teaching of the Torah.
Just as one constantly finds figs when he approaches the tree (since they do not all ripen at the same time, there are always some available for eating- Rashi), so too will one always find a new taste in the Torah he is studying.” Rabbi Yochanan
The fig tree thus conveys the double message of gaining Torah knowledge by appreciating the new thrill which comes with every step of learning, and the need to retain and protect that knowledge through constant review
Jesus himself, at the beginning of John’s Gospel, as he is gathering a group of disciples, as he sees Nathaniel coming towards him, declares:
Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” John 1.47,48
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid;
I go back to the buds, even now forming on the trees in my garden, signs of fruitfulness that is to come even after the ravages of winter.
Jesus tells his hearers to watch out for signs, for the fig, a symbol of the richness of God’s provision in the fruitfulness of the Promised Land, of the riches of his word; signs of God’s kingdom of justice and peace.
It is all a reminder to me at the start of Advent, as we prepare to embark on our preparations for our family celebration of Christmas, that we keep an eye on the bigger picture, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of one who is:
the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. Even Jesus Christ our Lord.