The Advent of the Everlasting Day
by Anthony Esolen
One of the marks of despair is a loss of the sense that time is going anywhere. Consider Macbeth before his final battle. When he learns of the death of his wife—and rumor has it, as Malcolm says when Macbeth's severed head is displayed before the true men of Scotland, that she has taken her own life "with self and violent hands"—Macbeth seems to resign his soul to the vanity of time:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Call it the cold-weather Scottish counterpart to what the ungodly men of Judah say: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." And then there is the modern progressive form of the same despair, made manifest as a loathing of the past, impatience with the present, and a desperate commitment to some paradise that can be built up, stone on stone, in the future, if only the correct people control things, and can obliterate the memories of foolish little people apt to get in their way. Says Isaac Watts:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
But that cannot be the last word for a Christian, and indeed it is not so in that consoling old hymn: we pray to "God, our help in ages past, / Our hope for years to come." We remember the gracious works of our God, and that lends us the strength now to hope for help again.
Yet even that is not sufficient. Odysseus might put his sometimes uneasy trust in the goddess Athena, hoping that since she had helped him often in the past, she might do so once again as he faces the throng of angry and desperate suitors. That still does not really move us on toward glory. Odysseus has done a lot of traveling, and to be sure his restless curiosity is a leitmotif, for good and for ill, throughout Western civilization. But at the end of the Odyssey, after he has slain his rivals, there is no sense that he will be going anywhere again. Order has been restored; time flows on; men are born and grow old and die; there is no new world.
The Home We Long For
The Christian experience of time is not so. We feel, as all men do, the pounding waves of mutability washing over the prow of our little boat. We remember, as Odysseus does, and we know the pain of longing for return: nostalgia. We look ahead, as the secular progressives do, understanding that our true home is not here, not yet.
But the home we long for is neither the old stone house in Ithaca nor the never-resting fantasy of madmen; our memory is not simply a record of things gone by, and our looking forward is not simply the dreaming of things that might be. Our salvation has already come. All that has been, and that is, and that is to come has already been brought among us in the seed and the bud and the first flower; and that is not by an act of our imagination, but by the design of the eternal God, who, unlike Athena and unlike whatever deity it is for whom the modern progressive offers up his soul, possesses all times at once, and all times in each time. He is the God who made the Sabbath: the seventh day, the day that has a morning, and no evening.
A Scene from Judah
So it is when Christians sing the traditional lauds for Christmas Eve. Behold the first antiphon: "Judea and Jerusalem, fear not: tomorrow you shall go forth, and the Lord shall be with you, alleluia."
Where, pray tell, are the babe in the manger, and the Christmas tree, and the chestnuts roasting on an open fire? The antiphon adapts for Christmas meditation a scene from the history of the Kingdom of Judah. The men of Moab and Ammon have advanced against Jerusalem, and King Jehoshaphat has prepared his army, but the word of the Lord comes to a Levite of the sons of Asaph, who says,
Hearken ye, all Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, and thou king Jehoshaphat, Thus saith the Lord unto you, Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's. . . . Tomorrow go out against them: for the Lord will be with you. (2 Chron. 20:15,17)
There is the babe in the manger: on the morrow comes the King of the Jews. He comes not to defeat a band of cruel Moabites and Ammonites. He comes to defeat the prince of this world, and the final enemy to be destroyed, which is death itself. The Old Covenant kept the Old Jerusalem in safety, for a time, but the New Covenant brings us the keys to the New Jerusalem, in time and beyond time.
A Scene from Exodus
The second antiphon is like the first: "This day you shall know that the Lord is coming, and tomorrow you shall see his glory."
It adapts a scene from Exodus. The children of Israel have been grumbling against Moses, because they are hungry. They would prefer the fleshpots of slavery to what they seem to think is the lean fare of liberty. Moses tells them that the Lord will rain down for them bread from heaven, which they will gather up every day except the Sabbath. Thus, at evening, "ye shall know that the Lord hath brought you up from the land of Egypt: and in the morning, then ye shall see the glory of the Lord" (Ex. 16:6–7).
The antiphon fittingly refrains from mentioning the grumbles, for pure joy draws near. The old manna, though it came from heaven, gave life only for a time, while the new manna, which is Christ himself, gives life forever. "I am the living bread which came down from heaven," says Jesus (John 6:51).
The Everlasting Morrow
The Old Covenant comes to its fruition in the New: it is not set aside, but fulfilled. The prophets, those holy men whom God stands on a slant to time, who always mean more than they know, foretell it; and so the antiphons conclude by looking back upon the prophecies that look forward to this day and, in types and shadows, to the true and all-comprehending and everlasting morrow:
Tomorrow the iniquity of the earth shall be blotted out, and the Savior of the world shall reign
over us.The Lord shall come; run forth to meet him, saying: It is the great beginning, and of his kingdom there shall be no end: the mighty God, the Ruler, the Prince of Peace, alleluia.
Tomorrow salvation shall be yours, says the Lord God of hosts.
May that same Prince of Peace rule in your hearts, now and in the time to come.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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