On Dread And Glad Tidings
An Advent Essay by Jared Stacy
About the author: Rev. Dr. Jared Stacy (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is a theologian and ethicist whose work centers on political extremisms and evangelical theology in America. Alongside serving as a hospice chaplain, his work has been featured on platforms like TIME, BBC, and Seen and Unseen, an outlet for the Centre for Cultural Witness for the Anglican Church. He resides with his wife and children near Washington, D.C.
When the angels arrived with glad tidings on Christmas, their first words to the shepherds were for us, too: “fear not!” And we must hear “fear not!” this year, especially. Without dread, there can be no glad tidings.
And yet, we have not always treated our situation as fearful, dreaded, or hopeless. This perspective—this feeling even—ebbs and flows.
In times past, some of us can recall the warm trappings of a comfortable, luxurious piety. It was a piety demanding we go off and scour a bit of darkness to make the light of hope seem brighter. This scouring search was more culturally proper—a festive sign of the season—than it was felt and obvious, and perhaps it was a burden we carried.
In Christmases past, some of us found ourselves working a little harder (the toil of privilege) in dredging up enough curated aesthetics of despair and dread to make the sentiment of Advent intelligible to our comfortable spirits.
A luxury. And where such luxury abides in churches, the kind that seeks out artificial despair and dread creates a community that can only ever witness an artificial Christ, one who does not really deal with the despair and dread of the world nor face it honestly.
But this Advent is different. As we glimpse the pulverized landscape of Gaza, as we bear the palpable dread of shadows from ascendant and aspiring authoritarianism the world over, we are no longer in need of the privileged, artificial dredging up of despair.
Dread is in the air. And the lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s bitter reflections against the backdrop of the American Civil War are more resonant than in recent years:
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"1
Incidentally, the American Civil War was one of Barth’s pet interests. In his 1962 American tour, Barth stopped at battlefields Gettysburg and Virginia, sites of immense destruction, prototypes of the horrors that framed Barth’s theology.
His attention to the American conflict was not at all tertiary; rather, his theology of krisis was, perhaps, just as resonant with the historical situation of America’s civil war as it was with the great contemporary terrors of 20th-century Europe.
Times of crisis, of not only despair but also decision, are why Barth resonates even now. The despair and dread of our time—the great “No” of judgment—is, by the eyes of faith, also the site of hope in and witness to God’s deliverance—God’s “Yes.”
Advent refuses to tear the “No” from the “Yes.” This is a great scandal that afflicts Christian witness in the eyes of the world.
To anticipate and, yes, celebrate Christmas as Christians involves an emphatic insistence that the world’s situation really is hopeless, according to humanity. And in this “No,” to put it simply, Christian witness, received by the world, is provoked in such a way to obscure the “Yes” of Advent—the scandal of Christian hope.
The despair and dread that attends the “No,” noted by Barth and captured by Longfellow, provokes all the rage and resistance from the world against the Christian community. Writing in IV.3.2, Barth notes:
the world hears…the painfully wounding word of a man who presumes to contradict its self-understanding and therefore to speak of perdition instead of misfortune and of sin and guilt instead of imperfection, who contests its freedom to take up different attitudes in relation to God, who resolutely questions its progress and any positive goal to be attained by it, who tells it quite plainly that it has erroneous view of itself, who proclaims its end as the judgement which comes upon it, who insists—and this is the most galling thing of all—that the name of a man who lived and died in the years AD 1-30 is the new thing in which alone there is enclosed all salvation and hope.2
But something is strange here and now. There is, right now, an open door to declare the “Yes” in light of the burdened, seemingly hopeless “No” of judgment.
In days past, the false, artificial pious “no’s”—arising from church or cultural life—now seem trite in comparison to the devastation we are witnessing in Gaza and the threats of mass deportations and authoritarianism in America. Is not this Advent a time to declare the “Yes” of Christian witness all the more earnestly?
This “Yes” of Advent is only intelligible in view of the menacing “No” —of hopeless suffering, of despair in today, of dread for the future. And if such hopelessness of the human situation is assumed—by the very breathing in of the air of despair and dread—how much more is the “Yes” of Advent, of Christian witness, the right and proper responsibility of the Christian community here and now?
To announce this “Yes” in Advent as Christians is to anticipate its final vindication and manifestation in the world as reconciliation with God. This is not a piety that evacuates into the sacred court of churches but one that serves the world.
As Barth writes, “Since Jesus Christ is a Servant, looking to Him cannot mean looking away from the world, from men, form life, or, as is often said, from oneself…to look to Him is to see Him at the very centre, to see Him and the history which, accomplished in Him, heals everything and all things, as the mystery, reality, origin, and goal of the whole world, all humanity, all life.”3
This “Yes” of Advent, burdened by the “No,” both bound up in the name Jesus, is the hidden ethos of Longfellow’s fourth verse that stretches over the terrors of the American Civil War to find a home in the advent of God’s justice for humanity:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.4
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Christmas Bells,” text, Academy of American Poets, Poets.org, accessed December 9, 2024, https://poets.org/poem/christmas-bells.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3.2, ed. Geoffrey William Bromiley, Thomas F. Torrance, and Frank McCombie (T&T Clark, 1975), 625.
Karl Barth, The Christian Life IV/4, trans. Geoffrey William Bromiley (T&T Clark, 1969), 150.
Longfellow, “Christmas Bells.”
I echo Victoria's comment. A most engaging piece.
My only hesitation is with the perceived contrast between a contrived 'no' of a more complacent past, and the rigourous and more realist 'No' of the present. I fear our perceptions of those who've gone before are inclined to be more of less superficial, failing to plumb the depth and complexity of their situation.
But I repeat, this is a minor matter set alongside the depth and richness of this Advent Essay.
Patrick Patterson
Thank you, Jared! Blessed Christmas! John