The End is found in the Beginning

As we celebrate this first Sunday of the season of Advent this morning, we find ourselves standing at the close of something old, and the beginning of something new—as the previous liturgical year comes to a close, we begin our new liturgical year with a period of expectation, awaiting the newness of the coming of Christ.  As a time of preparation, the season of Advent has been a feature of the liturgies of the Latin West since the fourth and fifth centuries—although originally tied to the feast of the Epiphany, with the increasing prominence of the feast of Christmas as a celebration of the birth of Christ in the West during this same period would lead to an association of Advent’s expectation with the birth of Christ—the term itself—Adventus—signifies a kind of ‘coming,’ ‘arrival,’ or ‘appearance’. 

The traditional language of the Western liturgy—in both its liturgical texts and its selected readings—voices the newness and expectation of Advent in reference to two ‘comings’ or ‘appearances,’ as interrelated theological realities.  Although the Advent and Christmas seasons are in one sense clearly focused on the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, the season also turns the eyes of our faith towards the second coming of Christ—our Gospel for today, taken from Matthew, exhibits this kind of emphasis on what the tradition has come to call the ‘last things,’ counseling us to ‘stay awake,’ and ‘be prepared’ because the Lord will come at an unknown hour.  These ‘last things’—eschatos in Greek—indicate something more than simply that which is last chronologically in historical time, but a fullness or completion found only in the end—in Christian usage, eschatology came to imply a theological view of reality in which salvation history is understood from the perspective of its final fulfillment in Christ.  

This perspective of eschatological fullness is characteristic in many ways of the kerygma or announcement of the heart of the Christian message, as it appears in the writings of the Evangelists and in the ministry of the early Church.  Christ himself puts this succinctly at the beginning of his Galilean ministry, as recounted in the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark: “This is the time of fulfillment.  The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  (Mk. 1:15).  From this perspective, in this ‘time of fulfillment’ the ‘advent’ of the kingdom of God becomes a kind of lens for understanding the life of the Church—and of created reality more broadly—within the context of the life of Christ as the fullness of salvation history.  According to the prophet Isaiah, ‘the end is declared from the beginning, and from of old things that are not yet done’ (Is. 46:10).  Perhaps inspired by this verse, in his Four Quartets T. S. Eliot recounts something similar: 

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.[1] 

If it is true, then, that the end is found in the beginning, we would be right to think that, from the perspective of the Church’s faith, Christ’s first and second advent are often hermeneutically intertwined.  With this in mind, we see that, in addition to its injunction to ‘watch’ and ‘be prepared’ today’s gospel from Matthew also invokes a memorable image from salvation history’s scriptural beginnings—the story of Noah and of the ark are redeployed by Matthew in this context as an image of salvation, in which God’s preservation of Noah and his companions from death in the flood in this first covenant now signify, in the context of the new covenant, the preservation of the faithful in the context of what Matthew calls ‘the coming, or, adventus, of the Son of Man.’  The Latin text of today’s Gospel in fact uses this term, adventus, twice, to refer to the ‘coming of the son of man.’  (See Mt. 24:37, 39). 

Particularly in the Latin-speaking theological traditions, the image of Noah’s ark began to function as a complex theological allegory for the life of the Church as early as the third century, emerging in North-African theologians like Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage.  Cyprian in particular applied this to the Church’s theology of Baptism using the same imagery of Noah and the flood, and this approach would be developed later by Augustine of Hippo.  By the Middle Ages, allegorical interpretations of the Church as Noah’s ark would grow in popularity—as evidence of this, the Ordinary Gloss suggests that today’s text from Matthew can in fact be read mystically, using the text’s own references to Noah’s ark and the flood from Genesis as an allegorical image of the Church. 

Perhaps the most theologically complex usage of this ark allegory in the Middle Ages is found in Hugh of St. Victor—a predecessor of Peter Lombard in the Victorine school, Hugh wrote two texts on the spiritual interpretation of Noah’s ark, focusing on its moral and mystical signification, respectively.  For Hugh, the construction of the ark as a bulwark against the flood represented as a kind of personal, social, and historical construction project—in one sense, the building of the ark, according to the specific blueprints found in Genesis, becomes a road map for personal growth in virtue; in another sense, it signifies the growth of the Church as a whole in all of its members; finally, the full construction of the ark represents the historical fulfillment of the Church’s mission, stretched between the two advents of Christ’s birth and his second coming.   

Exemplifying the visual culture of the Middle Ages, Hugh was not content to confine this kind of multifaceted exegetical engagement with the sacred page to mental abstractions—in fact, Hugh’s original twelfth-century manuscript was accompanied by a detailed visual diagram that depicted his moral and mystical interpretation of Noah’s ark.  Although this image has unfortunately been lost, the Victorine scholar Grover Zinn argues that Hugh’s original image may well have been similar to those found in the later writings of Hildegard of Bingen, who also used a visual image of Noah’s ark to depict the life of the Church in relation to the broader cosmos.[2]  We do have Hugh’s description of this image, however, which gives us at least some clues: invoking Isaiah’s vision of the divine throne room (Is. 6) Hugh depicts Christ enthroned, at the center of cosmos, with a rendering of Noah’s ark overlaid, in which the design of the ark itself allegorically represents both the individual and the Church as a whole in relation to Christ—the ark is ‘built’, therefore, within the Church as a personal and a collective reality, that fulfills in history God’s creative intent for the whole. 

As we begin this Advent season, therefore, Matthew’s injunction to ‘stay awake’ and to ‘be prepared’ for the advent of the Son of Man encourages us to understand ourselves—our own personal relationship with God and our personal struggles, along with the struggles of the human family in our age—within the larger frame of God’s ultimate intention for the whole of reality in Christ.  If the end is found in the beginning, then perhaps Eliot can remind us again, that: 

all shall be well and 
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.[3] 

If fire consumes the temporality of earthly goods and of the span of human life, Eliot seems to suggest that this death is made good by the death of Christ, which redeems us ‘from fire’ ‘by fire,’ purifying our intentions in divine love.[4]  May this Advent season be for us a time of purification and renewed expectation for us as well, as we eagerly await the coming of Christ, finding in him both the beginning and the end of our own lives in grace.  Amen.