IRONY AS VIRTUE, CYNICISM AS VICE

First Sunday of Advent, Year A

Here comes Advent again, and some of us will notice, ruefully, how quickly it has happened. It's not that we haven't been busy with this, that and the other since last time round: and it's not that we haven't been in the midst of events of one kind or another, bitter and sweet. Many of us will have been to weddings, and to funerals, those festivals of waxing life and waning life. Most of us will have sensed something wedding-like, something funeral-like, in our own personal and private fortunes, whatever has been going on in public.

These experiences are, as it were, the yield from our gazing into life's mirror. Nobody, man or woman, ever looks into a mirror without an element of enquiry about good news or bad news-mirrors really are formidable things, even if they cost us only ninety-nine cents each. You look at yours, I look at mine, and we find that much has indeed been happening, in the midst of our customary pragmatic business. Advent invites us to make a longer halt than usual in front of the mirror, and to enquire how things stand with us now.

Physically reliable mirrors are a quite recent invention: but for thousands of years the Christian church has been gazing into its public, its shared, mirror, which is the Bible. In today's first reading (Isaiah 2:1-5) we find that Isaiah was saying that, in a day to come, the Lord would so move people that they would 'beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again'.

And when we hear this visionary statement, we ought at least sometimes stand still and ask what we make of it. Is it, after all, the religious equivalent of muzak-something to glide over the eardrums without touching the mind? I went to a circus recently, at which one could have fairy-floss-a vanishing imitation of food, as the circus itself is a vanishing imitation of life's real events and tasks. Are the Bible's prophetic visions of a world without ferocity so many circus-performances: are its words so much fairy-floss?

These are not rhetorical questions. There are many hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, probably millions, who were, once, exposed with some frequency to God's visionary word, and who now seem to take about as much notice of it as any of us does to the Melbourne telephone directory of 1964. Are we so different from them? I don't see why we should assume that we are.

Advent is indeed a season of confrontation, a season to give us pause. It presses upon us the necessity to be genuine with God, and with one another, and with ourselves. It urges us to be less smoothly-flowing in our relationships, and in our prayers, and in our constant concessions to ourselves.

Advent is a nuisance. Its use is to be a nuisance. Advent has some of the reek of John the Baptist about it, that deeply offensive man. And, in God's providence, without John the Baptist, Jesus the transformer and the vindicator did not come.

So, to come back to Isaiah's visionary talk about an end to hostilities, where do we stand? I would suggest that where we might appropriately stand is on a terrain of some irony but not in the territory of cynicism. Let me explain.

Australian culture is rich in ironical visions-in seeing things from more than one perspective, and in having one perspective challenge another. God knows where we got this from: we may have picked it up from the Irish, or from some other untriumphant group: but wherever it came from, it is all over the place in Australia.

Personally, I think that this is a great, a providential, gift: it is a resource against obsession, and against tyranny, which is much in its favour. We test visionary claims in stringent ways, again and again. The bigger the claim, the bigger the test. It is a form of behaviour which fits in very well with our Lord's ironical, testing, form of speech. It is fine. It is Advent talk.

But cynicism, or instinctive scornfulness, does not test anything. It simply goes on being spun forth-like a kind of poisoned fairy-floss. There is nothing in cynicism, nothing to it, except a proneness to un-do and dis-able. Faced with Isaiah's visionary claim that (in modern terms) the missiles can be dismantled, the aircraft carriers can be junked, the Kalashnikovs can be recast as hoe and spade, cynicism proceeds to bleed all vitality out of such talk.

What cynicism does, on the world stage, or in your nearest barber-shop or office or bar-room or bedroom, is to worship futility. In the place of Bethlehem's star, blazing with power and with possibility, it sets a dark zero, a vacuum into which aspiration is sucked and annulled. It is no way for you or me to go. It is no way Christ our Lord could ever go.