By Rev. Robin Martin
Interim Rector
One of my all time favorite movies is an Italian flick called “Life Is Beautiful” starring Roberto Benigni. It came out a number of years ago and has often been billed as a “comedy” about the Holocaust, if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms for you. It does begin in a light-hearted manner with a young Italian Jew who waits tables but longs to own a bookstore, meeting and wooing a young and beautiful and well-connected Italian Gentile school teacher. All this happens under the growing, but seemingly distant, clouds of fascism.
But the heart of the movie comes about five or six years later when the man takes the woman, now become his wife, to teach at her school one morning, and their young son with him to work at the bookstore he’s since opened. The story darkens as a man comes into the store and demands that he come to the prefect’s office with him. He complies and leaves the young boy to tend the store while he’s gone. The next day, as the family prepares to celebrate the son’s fifth birthday, his mother goes off to fetch the grandmother for the party. When they return, they find a house in total disarray, and the father, the son and the father’s uncle, all of them Jews, gone. The mother knows immediately what has happened, and goes to railway station. After determining that her family has indeed been loaded onto the train of box cars getting ready to pull away from the station, she demands to be allowed on the train as well. They see one another briefly as the train unloads in the concentration camp, but, of course, in such places males and females are strictly separated so the mother must go her way while the son and father are led to another dormitory.
The remarkable thing about this story, as far-fetched as the action sometimes seems, is the father. He appears to have been blessed with a sense of joy in life which leaves him forever behaving in outrageously funny ways. He’s a truly irrepressible spirit, and when life turns ugly with the arrest and incarceration of his family, he turns that energy and spirit toward making his son believe that these horrendous circumstances they find themselves in, with angry, mean-spirited people on the one hand and exhausted, hungry, dispirited people on the other, is an elaborate game. The aim of the game is to accumulate a thousand points, and the prize for the team which gets the points first is a real live army tank. The child’s favorite toy in happier days had been a little tank he pulled behind him on a string. The man literally entices that little boy into doing what’s necessary to survive, making each deprivation into an opportunity to add points to their score, making each tale he hears about people being baked in ovens or made into soap and buttons into an attempt by other teams to discourage them from winning the prize. Again, for all the impossibilities of the story, it still becomes an incredible witness to the power, the saving power, of recasting what’s happening…or what will happen, for the sake of love.
In the gospel today, Jesus is talking to his disciples about what will happen at the end of time, and most particularly about the suddenness with which it will come. It’s a grim scene mainly because of its emphasis on our inability to predict or know when the end of time comes. That’s something that just makes us terribly uncomfortable. He tells us that God alone knows when the time will be, and that our job is to be continually alert and aware. This teaching of Jesus is almost impossible for you and me to hear and respond to positively. And the reason is that for us, the losers are the ones who are taken, not the ones who are left. For us, the losers are those who are found worthy to be suddenly in the presence of God, not the ones who are unworthy to be in the presence of God.
I’ve puzzled about this odd desire we probably share with many other human beings on the face of this planet in all times and in all places, this odd desire to stay on the face of this planet rather than to be united with the one who made us and loves us beyond our imagining. It seems to me that the desire to hold onto this life and this world is probably rooted in our great love for the gifts of time and place which our God gave to us in creation. Time is so comforting, defining as it does the enormity of eternity. Place is so warm and hospitable, inhabited as it is by people we care for and who care for us in return. It’s good to love these gifts given so freely by God for our comfort and our joy. But what Advent calls us to do is to look beyond the gifts to the giver. It’s a time to learn to desire the giver at least as much as we yearn to hold onto the gifts.
I wonder what would happen if we could recast the reading from the gospel this morning for the sake of love. I wonder how it might feel if we could see the separation from the time and place and people and things of this world which Jesus predicts at the end of time as winning rather than losing, as gaining the prize which is our heart’s truest desire rather than simply having to let go of that which we now hold most dear? In the movie, the child survived because of the father’s loving deception. Today, you and I are invited to move beyond the deceptive thinking that this is as good as it gets. We’re invited to do more than survive. We’re invited to thrive in the promise that as good as this all may be, there’s more, and it’s better, and if we are prepared we will greet it with irrepressible joy and experience it as immeasurable gain.