Shakespeare at Advent

Bill got it right, of course; of course, he often did. But in this case I think he got it less right than he thought, and more right than he knew.

He was, of course, writing about some girl (or some guy for those whose Shakespearean scholarship swings that way), some mortal who, we can be pretty sure, couldn’t live up to the praise the Bard heaped on her. Lotta pressures - who COULD live up to one of Bill’s sonnets? His poem complains that earlier poets, moved by lesser subjects, couldn’t do justice to his beloved. I would argue that his beloved, when she finally came sashaying across the dimly-lit backstage of literary history, couldn’t do justice to the playwright’s rap.

So what do we decide when a poet’s praise out-values the market, leading to infatuation inflation? Well, we could turn cynical and decide that no movie is ever as good as the trailer. We could lament with another poet, Robert Burns, that “nothing gold can stay.” Or (and I don’t think I thought this up myself but I can’t remember where I read it), we could consider that perhaps some inspired emptiness buried deep within the psyche of the race yearns for a fulfillment that earthly experience doesn’t seem to offer. Maybe we offer idolatrous praise to over-blown mortals because, at the bottom of it all, we have been made, not to compliment one another, but to worship God.

Or, as Peter expressed it, “Unto whom it was revealed , that not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into” - 1 Peter 1.12. This is the spirit of Philip the Evangelist as he thumbed a ride on the Ethiopian’s chariot, found the fellow gunnel-deep in Isaiah and, “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (Acts 8.35). This is the tradition of Apollo who, barn-storming the sawdust trail of ancient Achaia, “mightily convinced the Jews, and that publickly, shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ” (Acts 18.28)

The real kicker here is that Jesus agreed to sit for this portrait. “You search the Scriptures,” he told the leading Bible scholars of his day, “because you think that in them you have eternal life ; it is these that testify about Me” (John 5.39). Our Lord himself laid direct claim to be the satisfaction of that something within all of humanity that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, feels freer when it bends, and taller when it bows.

That’s what Advent comes down to: a looking back by which regain touch with those days before Christ came, when the world needed to do more praising than anyone they’d seen could take delivery on. The emptiness of Advent re-creates, not only our hunger to be saved, but our hunger to be struck into utter and delicious humility before One whose worship never overflows His worth.

But, of course, Advent also looks forward, to the Lord’s Second Coming. In that sense we recognize that while we now have a Savior who can handle all the adulation we can dish out, we lack the ability to praise Him according to His full worth. Advent urges us to long for that complete consummation when faith becomes sight, when, in the words of C. S. Lewis, truth ceases to be an abstract and we “can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom.”

Shakespeare saw that one coming, too. Earlier poets, he scoffed, spent their praise on unworthy objects. He, by contrast, feared to find his object too great for his praise:

And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Or, as a lesser poet but a greater saint expressed it,

When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave
Then in a nobler, sweeter song, I’ll sing Thy power to save.

And thus we pray at this Advent season: Even so, Lord Jesus, come.

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