Lessons and Carols yesterday renewed in me my marvel at the way in which God’s kingdom overthrows the proud and haughty, those who trust in their own strength and who put more stake in chariots or algorithms or bursaries than in the Lord of Hosts.
God’s response to the Serpent in the garden is the promise of a Son, a Seed of the Woman, who will crush his head (Gen. 3:15). In the face of cosmic despair and the far-reaching consequences of the Fall, this seems like foolishness. And it is, if what we count as wisdom are decisions based on trends of power. But the world has this weird way of experiencing “suddenlies.” Horses throw shoes, stronger armies fall into a route, earthquakes shake strong pillars, weeds left forgotten turn farmland into briar-patches, people fall in love, men considered cowards by all who love them suddenly stand-up for what is right, Elizabeth conceives a son and calls his name John, the list goes on. Small things and things unexpected and unlooked for, things counted-out-of-the-equation, suddenly demand a factoring.
The Magnificat rings with this truth, “He has brought down the mighty from their thrones / and exalted the humble and meek” (Lk 1.52). Sometimes, however, the dethronement of evil might, the supplanting of the iron crown of power, is especially delightful —especially song-worthy.
Listening to Dcn. Ben chant the Magnificat on Sunday, after hearing the whole story of redemption from Genesis to Revelation, I was reminded of a scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King:
All the power of Sauron (the main bad guy, mighty and evil) has been levied against the city of Minas Tirith (the great stronghold city of the southern kingdom of Gondor). The armies of Sauron include countless myriads of orcs and goblins, cave trolls, siege engines, huge earthworks set ablaze at the base of the walls, huge fortresses built on the backs of mammoths dressed for war and filled with archers, and armies of axe-wielding men. Leading all of this is the Witch-King of Angmar, undead, crowned with adamant and iron, who rides a massive winged beast whose very stench causes people to swoon and despair of life… all seems pretty powerful and mighty. Evil seems, certainly, enthroned.
Nothing can stand in the way of the tidal wave of burning, hacking, biting, killing. Though the folk of Minas Tirith kill tens of thousands, it makes less than a drop in the bucket.
At last, the evil army breeches the first wall of the city. Gandalf the wizard checks the advance of the Witch-King: “You cannot enter here […] Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master…” (p.811).
The With-King only laughs: “Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!” He lifts up his ghastly sorcerer’s blade and it flickers with tongued flame and worm light.
Evil is in the mighty position. All algorithms, probabilistic reckonings, wise predictions, betting pools, etc., all suggest that Sauron will have the day. Then, as the harbinger of things to come, something silly happens, no deus ex machina to save the day, something even smaller and more insignificant, a dumb beast, witless and newly awaked makes a noise:
“And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn” (p.811).
More good things happen, but I won’t spoil them here. I’ll only leave us with the rooster, the untrained cockerel, a weak and foolish thing, whose simple act of being itself checked the advance of Mordor, if only for a moment. The rooster’s cry was an unintentional revelation, and all the more revelatory because it was unintended, that a world exists beyond the thrall of Sauron. Beyond the battle fields, beyond the ash-choked sky, beyond the Witch-King and his spell-bound sinews, there’s a world where all the might of Sauron weights not in the counting.
“You have no power here” Sauron might say of Mordor, “this is my dominion.” What the rooster reminds us is that Sauron’s dominion, the place where he has power, is just a small place within a much larger World that exists beyond Sauron. So also Advent finds us reading the books of the prophets, singing the Psalms of Messianic hope, hearing the chants and songs of people like Mary, and Zecharia, and Simeon. Like the rooster in Return of the King, we are doing more than proclaiming that evil’s “gonna get what’s coming to it” and that injustice will finally “be fixed for good.” Like the cockerel our songs proclaims something far more subversive, not merely that the big things will be thrown down, but that they weren’t really that big or permanent or lasting or truly strong to begin with.
When the rooster crows to announce the breaking of Dawn on Good Friday, he too is heedless of the dark events that day will hold. He is not some pagan portent come to spook. He is, rather, come to do the most portentous thing of all: to proclaim that, whatever happens this day for good or ill, the Dawn has come for the same reason Dawn has always come, because He who is the Word of the Father said “Let there be light” and neither the ruling of Pilate, nor the curses of Peter, nor the treachery of Judas, nor the intrigues of Herod, nor the sedition of the Rules of the Synagogue, can countermand that Word.