The Two Keys to Heaven
O key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel,
that openest and no man shutteth,
and shuttest and no man openeth:
come and bring the prisoner forth from the prison house,
and him that sitteth in darkness and in the shadow of death.O Antiphon for 20 December
Even a merely human king, or for that matter any modern form of ruler, has the power severely to curtail his or her subjects’ liberties. this is perhaps more obvious to most people over the last couple of years then it might have been before. The power of the state can lock us into prisons, and even into our own homes. It can force children to go to school for the first 18 years of their life. It can also, of course, grant pardon and liberty. but the power it possesses is enforced by the threat of confinement and, ultimately, violence. Behold the streets of the US, Hong Kong, Australia and, rather less predictably, Holland. Such is the power of a king’s key.
But our Lord, as Ss Luke and Matthew go to some length to make clear, a merely human king. Joseph is of the Royal House of David, but if Jesus’ only human parent is Mary, then this makes him a king in human terms only by adoption. His true kingship is the kingship bestowed on him by his true Father, and his Kingdom, as he says, is not of this world. His Kingdom is the Kingdom of heaven, and he is the key which opens the gates of heaven and hell and opens the door to eternal life.
Yet if we move forward to the adult Jesus, preparing to die, we find that he hands over this authority to the Church not as one key, but apparently as two:
And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Matthew 16:19
Conventionally, this is taken to refer to the authority of the church to forgive sins or, when necessary, to withhold forgiveness until the sinner truly repents. Hence, one key to open, and one key to lock. And this is true. But there is a further interpretation particularly relevant to this season of Advent.
In the 9th canto of Dante's Purgatory, the poet meets the Angel whom St Peter has entrusted with these keys. One key is gold, and one key is silver. According to the least well known of the Inklings, Charles Williams, an Anglican mystical writer, novelist and authoritative interpreter of Dante, these keys represent the affirmative and negative ways of prayer, both of which he deems absolutely necessary if we are to ascend to the beatific vision of God in heaven. The affirmative way is that which uses words and images to describe God and aid us in our understanding of him. The way of Saint Ignatius of Loyola might be a good example. The negative way is that which recognises that any words, concepts, or images that we use of God can only ever fall short of describing or apprehending him: anything we say of God is ultimately untrue. One of the most famous exemplars of this path is Dionysius the Areopagite. But even he recognises that we need the affirmative images and concepts of God before we can break them down.
I find myself wondering whether this twofold approach to union with God is reflected in the two figures on whom we focus so much of our attention in Advent: John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. John’s faith, after all, is grounded in the powerful imagery of the Jewish scriptures, and particularly the prophecies of Isaiah. He has to find an actual, literal desert, something external to him, to hear God’s voice, and he hears that voice as words. Mary, on the other hand, is visited directly by an Angel, an invisible intelligence, and as direct a manifestation of the energy of God as the mortal mind can bear. While there are pious legends about Mary learning the scriptures from her mother, there is a certain innerness and immediacy of her vision of the angel in glory, and I think there is something to the fact that her wilderness, in contrast with Jones, is an inner wilderness, the emptiness of her virgin womb. The Word of God is conceived within her directly by the Holy Spirit, unmediated by the human words even of scripture. Something is happening to her that goes beyond reason, and her response is not to understand, not to pretend that we can comprehend God with our human minds, but simply to say yes with all her soul, “be it unto me according to thy word.”
We approach Christmas quite properly with the prophecies of Isaiah in our hands. Christ himself is the key to unlocking those prophecies, both through the “golden” path of the feast of images it offers us, and the “silver” path that pierces through those images, to the light of God which transcends all imagination.