Behold thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. Matthew xxi.1

S A CHILD I was always struck by the untidiness of Advent. For one thing, as we sang the Advent Prose in procession from a darkened Chapter House, we were looking forward to something we knew full well had already happened - the Coming of Christ at Christmas. Then there was all that end of the world stuff - talk of the Four Last Things - which everyone said were the themes of the four weeks of Advent but which didn't seem to quite happen in the Sunday lectionary. A complete muddle, then, not helped by the fact that, beyond the Church, Christmas was in full swing everywhere else.

And yet how I loved - and how I love - Advent! Partly, of course, it's the music: the plainsong of Rorate caeli and the Alma Redemptoris Mater, exuberant motets such as Byrd Laetentur caeli, German chorales such as Nun komm de Heiden Heiland and Wachet auf, the recitatives, arias and choruses of the first part of Handel's Messiah, old melodies such as Veni, veni Emmanuel, and modern hymns, such as 'Lo he comes with clouds descending' and 'Hills of the North rejoice'.

But it isn't only the music that makes Advent so special: it is the rich tapestry of themes, so confusing to a child, and the criss-cross between narrative and theme.At one level, there is the simple narrative trajectory: we focus at once on two particular Advents, two particular Advents of Christ. One is historical, looking forward, with Isaiah and the prophets, to the coming of the Messiah, waiting for the prophecy of Malachi to come true: 'the Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple, the messenger of the covenant whom ye delight in. But who can abide the day of his coming?' The other trajectory is eschatological, looking beyond our own lives to doomsday, when there will be 'signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars…distress of nations…men's hearts failing them for fear' and 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory', as St Luke tells us in the Gospel on Advent II (BCP lectionary). St John Chrysostom describes these two Advents of Christ very colourfully:

At his first coming, God came without any brilliance, unknown by most, prolonging the mystery of his hidden life by many years…. He did not tear open the heavens so as to come on the clouds, but rather, he came in silence into the womb of a virgin ...

But his second coming will not be like that. He will come with such brilliance that it won't be necessary to announce his coming: 'As the lightning from the east flashes to the west, so will the coming of the Son of Man be.' (Mt 24:27) It will be the time of judgment and of sentencing.

The historical trajectory feeds our longing for Christmas, our growing excitement as the boar's head and the figgy pudding come closer. The eschatological trajectory feeds our anxiety about the state of the world and, more particularly, our anxiety about our own obsolescence, our fading powers and imminent death.

But it isn't these two stories of Advent only - the coming of Christ at Christmas and the coming of Christ at doomsday - that we have to contend with. The twelfth century Archdeacon in England, Pierre de Blois, identifies three Advents:

There are three comings of Christ: the first, in the flesh; the second, in the soul; the third, at the judgment ... . He is Lamb in his first coming, Lion at the last, a Friend full of gentleness in the second.

Today's Gospel - the magnificent frontispiece for Christ's saving death and resurrection - is yet another Advent, his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. And, as Advent goes on, we shall increasingly encounter St John the Baptist pointing to the coming of Christ in our midst, inaugurating the Kingdom of God. And then we have to contend with the different meanings of that: the Kingdom inaugurated by Christ's Birth, the Kingdom inaugurated by Christ's ministry, the Kingdom inaugurated by Christ's Triumphal Entry into Zion and the Jerusalem temple, the Kingdom inaugurated by the Cross and Resurrection, the Kingdom, for which we daily pray, into which we enter by Baptism, the Kingdom for which we daily pray into which we enter by our death and the Particular Judgment, the Kingdom which will finally be inaugurated on earth when the Father hands over dominion and sovereignty to the Son.

A criss-cross between narrative and theme, between history and theology, between time and eternity, between past, present and future: it is all a glorious jumble and no wonder it is so immensely satisfying. Here is a treasury of spirituality, a treasury of theology, a treasury of music and prose. There is no more point - or possibility - in trying to sort it all out than there is in trying to unravel a bowl of spaghetti or draw out the separate coloured threads of a tapestry.

The problem comes when we begin to live in a society which has not learnt the narratives and which has barely heard of the themes. Someone coming into our midst, as a stranger and enquirer, who had little knowledge of the stories, and little familiarity with the themes, would enter an almost impenetrable maze. Ideas going in all directions - the ass and the colt; body and blood; bread and wine; death and judgment; heaven and hell; highways and repentance; Jerusalem and desolation; sacrifice and sacrament; wilderness and Zion. And many of these words, in themselves pictorial, conceal allegory and metaphor, concept and theological shorthand.

I am not suggesting for a moment that we need to abridge or simplify, change or modify the language of lectionary and liturgy.These are gifts to celebrate and constantly revisit, year after year, each time plumbing new depths of devotion and understanding. The Cambridge philosopher Catherine Pickstock has reminded us of the naïveté of trying to make the liturgy too linear, too much like a logical narrative. The search for authenticity in the sixties and seventies was finally less fruitful than was hoped. Nowadays we know that original musical instruments don't create original musical performance conditions; more than that, were it possible to create original performances, we should find them a good deal less satisfying than our modern reconstructions. We are learning something of the same about liturgy. Even if we could recover fourth century liturgy, would we want to? Would we want to say that everything that has happened since has been an unfortunate development? More particularly, as Pickstock has shown, the layering of liturgy - so that there is no logical progression but, rather, a collage of colour and a tapestry of themes - gives us something that shouldn't be dismantled and arranged in straight lines. The themes need to be held together in a complex way.

But what I am saying is that we need to find new ways of telling the story - new methods of mission and evangelism, and most particularly new methods of catechesis and formation.We can no longer assume that those whom we encounter will have will have learnt the Lord's Prayer at their mother's knee, acquired a basic hymnody repertoire at school, learnt the rough outline of the Judaeo-Christian tradition from Noah's Ark to the Acts of the Apostles and picked up a working acquaintance with Christian ethics. The work of secularisation has been going on a-pace for quite some time: I remember teaching A-level Music twenty five years ago when the set work was the Bach Magnificat. I have never forgotten how hard the students found it to understand what a Magnificat was. It's a canticle sung at Vespers. What's a canticle? What's Vespers? It's basically a few verses from St Luke's Gospel. Who was St Luke? What's a Gospel? It tells of the story of when Mary met Elizabeth? Who's Mary ? Who's Elizabeth?

The essential point is this: whilst churches such as this must continue to celebrate the Liturgy in all its depth and splendour, within the rich musical and ritual tradition, and whilst this celebration is in itself a way of working for, proclaiming and hastening God's Kingdom, it isn't the only task in hand for us as the Church.If we focus entirely on the celebration of the Liturgy - as for instance the Orthodox Church in Russia had to be content to do under seventy years of Communism - much will remain, not least the faithful remnant who preserve that Liturgy. But, if we are truly going to advance the Kingdom, then we must also learn to tell the story - the narratives - and teach people not to be afraid to explore the over-lapping meanings of the themes. Without the story we have a cyclical fertility religion, not unlike Hinduism. Without the rich tapestry of imaginative themes we have the stark and over-cheerful worship of some of the evangelical churches, which reduce the Christian message to six bald facts and a challenge.

In this enterprise of learning to communicate the faith, I am beginning to think that we have slightly overdone the mission and evangelism message - go out and fetch people in - and considerably under-cooked the task of catechesis and formation.The Risen Christ, at the end of Matthew's Gospel, does not say 'Go out and preach the Gospel to all nations' - though that is part of the task. He says 'Go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them…and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you'. Brutally, the Church has managed from time to time to fill the pews - suffocating social convention and the will of kings have helped - but how well have we learnt to catechize those in the pews? How well have we learnt to form our families - the domestic Church - in the Way of Christ? How well have we ourselves been formed as disciples of Jesus Christ? How much have we learnt, apart from the odd confirmation course, the odd Lent study group, the bare-bones of catechesis and teaching provided by the Sunday readings and the Sunday sermon?

This, then, I think, is the urgent task - the task of catechesis and formation. And in all this the story of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, today's Gospel, is as ever an example and paradigm. Christ comes into Jerusalem in a manner which not only fulfils the message of the prophets, with which they were all familiar, but which graphically illustrated the true nature of kingship. More than that, he went on to the Temple, there to teach in the simplest way, with story and saying. Let this be the inspiration for our task as we ponder upon the Advents of Christ.

Behold thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. Matthew xxi.1

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet

First preached at St Mary, Bourne Street, on Advent Sunday 2007

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