A juxtaposition was quite startling to me this third Sunday in Advent in London. On Sunday afternoon we took the tube from the British Library to the corner of New Bond and Oxford street heading to a favorite haunt for a cider one can only get in the UK. We walked along Oxford Street amidst a huge flow of people moving along the wide sidewalks and we were barely able to squeeze past each other in the crush of Christmas shopping. I’ve experienced few places so crowded with people in the West as on this third Sunday in Advent amidst the shops and decorations.
New Bond Street is where all the upscale, high end stores are located with their well dressed security guards whose presence communicates that this is only for those with the money to spend. I was struck, walking down that street, by our obsession with the need to deny our bodies by covering them with expensive clothing, jewelry and watches that tell people we are all perfectly fine and wonderfully beautiful. The street is a testimony to how we have been acculturated to give ourselves meaning and identity in consuming articles that cover up and hide the underlying fact of earthed nature in bodies that, by and large, can never match the symbols of them on bill boards and shop windows.
In naming Theophilus and Herod, Luke framed his story. This week we ponder questions that arise from the introduction of Zecharias and Elizabeth.
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