Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
admin | 13 December 2009“This is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.”
He is a prophet and yet more than a prophet for he stands on the brink of the fulfillment of all prophecy and yet he, too, is a figure in the darkness of Advent. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Such is the question of John the Baptist to Jesus about Jesus.
A question that he asks from prison, it reminds us that the wilderness of human pride and presumption is greater than the wilderness of Judaea. He is in prison, Matthew later explains, because he had the temerity to upbraid Herod the tetrarch, one of the Roman rulers, for marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias. Though Herod wanted to put John to death, he “feared the people,” and instead kept him in prison. But on Herod’s birthday, the daughter of Herodias, unnamed in the Gospels but named by the Jewish historian, Josephus, as Salome, danced before her uncle and step-father so pleasingly that he “promised to give her whatever she might ask”. At her mother, Herodias’ prompting, she asked for “the head of John the Baptist on a platter”, which request Herod reluctantly granted to her on account of his promise. And so John was beheaded. There is a cost when truth speaks to power.
The scene has captured the imagination of artists, poets, playwrights and musicians. The fuller story gives added poignancy to Jesus’ remarks about John the Baptist. He is the forerunner of Jesus not only by his birth and ministry but also by his witness and death. In every way, he is the messenger sent to prepare the way of Christ. And his ministry becomes an essential feature of the Church’s ministry, signalled so clearly in Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians and captured so beautifully in the Collect. “Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries” – referring to the mysteries of Christ – “may likewise” – after the example of John the Baptist, that is to say – “so prepare and make ready thy way.” How? “By turning the hearts of the disobedient,” my heart and yours, “to the wisdom of the just.” Tough, uncompromising stuff! And yet, it belongs precisely to the deep joys of the Advent preparation for Christmas.
The theme of judgment is inescapably part of the meaning of the Incarnation; judgment then, now, and still to come. The judgment is the light of the truth of God in Christ who brings “to light the hidden things of darkness,” and makes “manifest the counsels of the hearts”. To what end? That “then shall every man have praise of God.” There is far more to the mystery of Christmas than God’s accommodation of himself to us. Such has become our idolatry. God made in our image is the assumption in our contemporary culture whether stated or unstated.
This leads to some rather surprising and depressing results. The latest report of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, entitled “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths”, comments on the growing complexity and “cacophony of spirituality in America”, read North America, what the New York Times op-ed writer, Charles Blow, calls “a mash-up of traditional faiths, fantasy and mythology”. And superstition, too, from ghosts to ouiji boards, from the evil eye to spiritualism and conversations with the departed. What is lost is any sense of the integrity and logic of classical religion, especially Christian orthodoxy. It has been replaced by a smorgasbord of conflicting, contradictory and confused ideas, people “cobbl[ing] together Mr. Potato Head-like spiritual identities from a hodgepodge of beliefs,” as he wonderfully puts it, “bending dogmas to suit them instead of bending themselves to fit a dogma”. It is the classic case: if you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything. The culture of designer religion is only about the vanity of ourselves.
Such is our darkness, the darkness of ignorance and presumption. And yet, as this Sunday reminds us, it is in the bringing to light of the hidden things of darkness both within us and around us that we become aware of the wonder of God. “Then shall every one have praise of God.” Something of the wonder and the truth of God is made known in the midst of the confusions and conflicts, uncertainties and limits of our world and day. Jesus reminds us of the crucial role that John the Baptist plays and, by extension, the ministry of the Church, in awakening us to that deeper reality.
It does not and cannot happen through the mindlessness of blind faith. It happens in and through the to-and-fro of questions, through the quest for understanding, an understanding that is a way of living, too. Heart and mind.
In the Gospel, Jesus does two things. First, he responds to John’s heartfelt question, “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another.” The passionate desire for the truth is everything. Jesus’ response is to say to John’s disciples, “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see”. What are those things? They have to do with the radical meaning of Christ’s coming: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” And all for what end? A better world? A mere extension to life, a momentary reprieve from the inevitabilities of suffering and death? No. For our praise of God. “Then shall every one have praise of God.”
Healing and salvation are about our life with God. They are about something more than the often sad and depressing realities of our daily lives. Here is the light that names the darkness and yet is more than the darkness. It is the vision of righteousness and hope that John has sought for in his ministry. Jesus is saying that it is fulfilled in himself – the events of the Gospels chronicle exactly these things, after all. “Jesus Christ was born for this,” we will sing at Christmas.
Secondly, Jesus reminds us of how the ministry of John the Baptist has awakened us to those things that have to do ultimately with a larger vision of our humanity. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks us three times, forcefully calling attention to the preaching of John the Baptist as the essential preparation for his own coming. We do want something more than the empty vanities and endless deceits of the world, something more than the empty vanities and endless deceits of our own hearts of darkness. John the Baptist is about that desire and longing for our being made right again, knowing how bent out of shape we really are. It is not just Tiger Woods, I suspect, who wants to be a better person!
It does not mean an end to suffering and death. It means a new way of seeing everything and a new way of being with one another. In T.S. Eliot’s verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Archbishop Thomas Becket faces the likelihood of his being killed by the King’s men who see him as trouble and an inconvenience for the realm of England. “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Henry II is reported to have said, a sentiment by no means limited to Kings! The law of obedience to God confronts the law of obedience to earthly powers and pretentions. Which power serves who and in what way? In the Interlude between the two parts of the play, Eliot has the Archbishop deliver his Christmas sermon. In it, he notes that we celebrate the birth of Christ with the re-enactment of his Passion and Death. Such is the Mass.
“At the same moment we rejoice in His coming for the salvation of men, and offer again to God His Body and Blood in sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,” words which echo the Prayer of Consecration in the Prayer Book. This, “as the World sees”, he says, is “to act in a strange fashion. For who in the World will both mourn and rejoice at once and for the same reason? For either joy will be overborne by mourning, or mourning will be cast out by joy; so it is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason.” And the Advent theme of peace, too, takes on a deeper meaning; peace indeed, not peace as the world gives but peace as found in the praise of God.
These are the things which in the idolatry of ourselves we have forgotten, perhaps, only to find ourselves captive to the vain imaginations of our hearts, captive to superstition and foolishness, woefully and wilfully ignorant of the teachings which are light and life. Jesus’ final word to John the Baptist is profoundly telling about the deeper extent of our darkness: “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” The ministry of John the Baptist is part and parcel of the ministry of the Church, the ministry of preparing the way for the one who comes by awakening us to our own darkness and awakening in us the desire for the healing light. Here Jesus points to John as the one who turns us to him.
“This is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.”
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, Christ Church
December 13th, 2009