Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

As we approach the end of the church year, our daily and weekly readings have given us glimpses of the main themes of Advent, a season with an unusual degree of multivalency. The term adventus (or the verb advenio) in the Latin means “coming,” although there are multiple senses of the word at play in this context.

On the one hand, we look back to the coming of Jesus in the revelatory moment of Incarnation, which was a historical event with cosmic significance. In the present, we look for the coming of God into our lives individually, through the sacramental reception of Christ in communion, and through the presence of the Holy Spirit, who is “everywhere present and filling all things.”

As we enter into Advent, we also see a future theme of adventus, that of Christ’s “coming in glory to judge the living and the dead.” This is a theme we forget about in modern Protestant life.

When I was in Romania this past fall, nearly every monastery I saw had a final judgement scene painted on the outer wall around the entrance to the church. Every time you went to church, you saw the whole scene: God sitting on a throne, a river a fire (interpreted as the love of God) flowed from the throne, and also became a place where some people languished (those who could not orient themselves towards God’s love). The individual, usually naked, would stand underneath a scale, balanced by a hand underneath the throne, and holding good deeds and bad (the latter were being carried to the scale by demons). While crowds of saints stand by cheering on the individual in judgment, an angel was often seen pushing down the “good” side of the scale—a very telling twist in the story!

These scenes seem scary at first, but the more you look at them and think about them, the more you take in the enormity of God’s salvation and his mercy to those who live their lives in repentance and faith.

This brings us to today’s Epistle reading from Revelation 21, where in richly symbolic terms denoting perfection and fulfillment, the Church is depicted as the city of Jerusalem, descending out of heaven, adorned “as a bride for her husband,” and in the current passage, as a city with twelve gates made from precious stones.

The most appropriate musical connection I can make is to an interregnum anthem by Edgar Bainton (1880-1956), And I saw a new heaven (1928), which describes the situation of the new heavens and earth and of this new Jerusalem from verses 1-4 of Revelation 21.

And I saw a new heaven, Edgar Bainton (look in the video description for the text of the anthem).

Yours in Christ,

—Justin