Advent Hope - Day 14

A longer than usual blog post today as we share a post that is appearing today in our local newspaper, the original can be viewed here

Reflection

The world can be a scary place. We hear of wars and conflicts, we see division between people; we have in recent history wrestled with a pandemic and are told there is a possibility of another one at any time. People talk to me about fear of crime and of some of the people on the streets because they look different or act erratically. We are constantly told in news reports of things which can harm or kill us or bad things happening to people which could happen to us at any moment!

Some people do very well out of making us feel fearful, politicians love to say that those who are ‘different’ are somehow a threat – not just in the USA, where they seem to have recently run an election based solely on ‘Culture Wars’, but here in Canada where some politicians are using the same playbook to try and convince us that if someone is different from the ‘accepted norms’ they are dangerous to us, to our kids, our culture, our economy, whatever. Fear is big business and making us feel unsafe seems to be an important part of the politics of today, in fact fear has been part of politics, religious institutions, and society since time immemorial.

There are frightening stories in many of the Scriptures of the world: terror-filled encounters with the Divine, conflicts and violence, and within religious traditions and institutions such accounts have been used to create fear both for believers and non-believers. Yet at the heart of the spiritual traditions of our world, there is the opposite of scaremonger culture, as we are shown a peace that is possible when we live in love and faith, with compassion towards ourselves and one another. The heart of Christian tradition is one such example of the call and the inspiration to not live in fear.

In the translation of the Bible called ‘The King James Version’ apparently the words ‘fear not’ appear 365 times – one for every day of the year (though in leap years it’s OK to be afraid on February 29th I guess). I tried to find out on the interwebs if that really is the case, as I don’t have time to read the whole Bible and count for myself, but I found myself in a kind of rabbit-hole of strange interpretations of faith. I did find out that ‘Don’t be afraid’ and variations of that phrase turn up 91 times in more modern translations of the Bible and usually are said to people by God, Jesus or Angels. It’s the phrase that the Angel says to Mary in the story we call ‘The Annunciation’, when she hears the news that she is to have a child who will be special and will bring new life to all people. It’s the beginning of the story which we are about to celebrate at Christmas time, the birth of Jesus. This story is about the love of God being shared in human form in the person of Jesus who shows us what it means to live from an attitude of perfect, self-giving, love.

We read in the Gospel of John ‘God so loved the world that God gave their only son’ and later on in a book of the Bible called First John we read, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.’’ In a world where people profit from fear, I hope that we gain inspiration from this season of love, and that this Christmas is a time of peace and love for you all.

Scripture

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.  1 John 4.18

Henry Ossawa Tanner - The Annunciation, more details and a reflection here