“Art thou he that should come?”
Questions upon questions upon questions. Advent is the season of questions, questions that open us out to the majesty and the wonder of God. “How shall this be seeing as I know not a man?” Mary asks, and in this season of questions, everything, we may say, hangs upon her answer, “be it unto me according to thy word.” But to enter into this mystery, the mystery which takes flesh and comes to birth through her at Christmas, we need the figure of John the Baptist as well.
Mary and John. There is a pattern here, we may say, a pattern woven out of the coincidence of names: Mary and John the Baptist in Advent; Mary and John the Beloved Disciple in Lent and, most especially, at the Cross on Good Friday. Two different figures named John but one Mary, the Mother of God. Yet somehow this coincidence of names helps us to appreciate the role of Mary, on the one hand, and the complementary voices of prophecy and discipleship, on the other hand. And such things are very much to the point of the Advent season and especially on the Third Sunday in Advent. They remind us of the dual nature of the ministry of Word and Sacrament.
John the Baptist points us to the one who comes both by his questions – “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?”- and his declaration, “behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” Question and answer, in a way, even as Mary’s question leads to the response about “the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit” by which “the Lord shall be with thee.” Yet it is only through her answer: “be it unto me according to thy word” that this will be accomplished. Somehow John the Baptist and Mary complement one another to form the delightful and wonderful tableau of the Advent of Christ.
Mary and John dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. He points to the one who comes and to the need for our repentance and to our thirst for holiness. She freely yields herself to the divine initiative in an activity of willing and knowing obedience without which God cannot be with us, our Emmanuel, and, without which, too, we may add, we cannot be with him.
In a way, the lessons of essential Christianity are clear. Grace, to be sure, is what comes from God to us. But it has to engage us and to engage us wholly. We are drawn into the mystery of God in which we discover the mystery of ourselves in the vision of our humanity restored. But it means that we have to think it, to take a hold of it with our hearts and our minds. The questions of Advent are all about taking hold intellectually of what is proclaimed and communicated to us in the pageant of God’s Word written and celebrated, sacramentally and liturgically.
And that pageant comes to a wonderful fulfillment in the Advent figures of Mary and John. John sums up in himself the pageant of Old Testament prophecy. He is at once a prophet and more than a prophet. He is sent “to prepare the way” of the one who comes, “the latchet of whose shoes he is not worthy to untie,” he says, in a lovely image of genuine humility. He signals hope even in the midst of despair. He calls out in extravagant and poignant cries for holiness, the desire and the longing for God. He points to the one who comes.
Mary is the chosen vessel through whom God is made man, God with us, Emmanuel. “The word became incarnate, /and yet remains on high.” Such is the mystery of the Advent of Christ and his holy birth.
But the questions of each serve to enfold us in that mystery thinkingly. And that is just the point; our thinking engagement with the motions of God coming towards us and being with us. The questions of John the Baptist open us out to the deeper meaning of the one who comes, answering in a way, the Advent question on the First Sunday of Advent, “who is this?” And Mary’s question, “how shall this be…?” opens us out to the real presence of the one who comes to birth through her in the simple wonder of “the Word made flesh.”
And what are the answers to the questions of John the Baptist? They are the words of salvation and healing brought near in today’s gospel. “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and poor have the Gospel preached to them.” They are the words which the great bidding prayer of Advent at the service of Lessons and Carols recalls, the words of prophecy on the brink of fulfillment in the ministry of John the Baptist, a prophet and yet more than a prophet, for he stands on the threshold of all prophecy fulfilled. His voice is the voice of “one crying in the wilderness” who points us to the voice of Christ, the voice of the Word of God with us, but only through the voice of Mary’s assent to the meaning of all prophecy, “Be it unto me.”“The Lord” who is the Word and Son of the Father “is with thee,” with Mary, and only so can he be with us.
What do such things signify? That in the birth of Christ is the hope and desire of all nations, the hope and desire of the whole of our humanity, the hope and desire for healing and salvation, for our being made whole. John is in prison, the victim of the overreach of governments and powers, be they ecclesiastical or political. And yet he makes of his prison cell an antechamber for the mystery of God’s coming among us. And as the poet John Donne observes, Mary’s womb, too, is a kind of prison where God wills to be contained for our salvation, for the sake of our being with him who wills to be with us.
The whole ministry of John the Baptist comes down to this moment, and to this question: “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” It brings into the open the response of Christ who points us to John as the one who prepares us for the coming of Christ. John awakens in us the desire which is brought to fulfillment through the acquiescence of Mary to the divine design for our salvation, a design which dignifies and honours in the fullest possible way the truth of our humanity. The truth of our humanity is to be found in our being with God.
Through the questions of John the Baptist and Mary the Virgin Mother, we engage the God who wills to be with us, the God who seeks the perfection and the healing of our wounded and broken humanity, not through the waving of the magical wands of technological hubris, but through the quiet persistence of prayer and service, sacrificial and selfless, the qualities of the lowliness of Mary who shows us how to honour the holiness of his name.
The ministry of John the Baptist calls us to repentance – to what is at once verbal and sacramental; the ministry of Mary calls us to the patient waiting upon the one who wills to be with us but only if we, like her, act “according to thy word,” the Word who is with us in the Word proclaimed and in the Sacraments celebrated. To attend thinkingly and thoughtfully to the pageant of Word and Sacrament is the advent of Christ in us. He is, indeed, the one that should come. We can, indeed, look for no other. And our looking is not in vain.
“Art thou he that should come?”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Advent III, 2010