Month: November 2011

“Then Jesus turned”

The Sunday Next Before Advent – proxima ante. What a lovely conjunction of prepositions, those little words that give direction and position to words and ideas in  their relation to one another! With the word ‘next’, we have a sense of continuity, as in a series where one thing follows upon another, next being what follows in sequence. With the word ‘before’, we are alerted to the beginnings of something new; in this case, the season of Advent. This Sunday, with its double prepositions of next and before, signals a transition. It is a time of endings and beginnings; a time, too, of renewal.

The endings and beginnings all turn upon one thing: our life in Christ. “Come and see,” Jesus says here in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, as part of the dialogue of question and answer with two of the disciples of John the Baptist who, as it turns out, are about to make a transition and become the disciples of Jesus. “What do you seek?” Jesus has asked them, having turned to them as they were following him after hearing John the Baptist’s remarkable pronouncement about Jesus as “the Lamb of God.” They had replied, oddly it may seem with another question, “Rabbi – Master, where dwellest thou?”

Jesus’ question and statement are the first forms of direct speech by Jesus in John’s Gospel. “What seek ye?” “Come and see.” The first question; the first command. There is something profound and wonderful in these words. They speak at once to the whole pageant of our lives in faith – seeking ultimately what God wants for us which is to be found in our coming and seeing but also in our abiding with Jesus. This has been, we might say, the nature and purpose of the Trinity season. Yet, there is the Advent theme, too, signalled here, at once by John the Baptist, who points out Jesus to us, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” and in the simple but profound moment of Jesus turning to the disciples of John to ask them, “what seek ye?” Advent is about our turning back to the center of our lives but only because the center has turned to us. “Then Jesus turned.”

(more…)

Print this entry

“For God created man for incorruption, and made him
in the image of his own eternity”

In the narthex of the Church, in the entrance porch above the second set of doors, there is inscribed the following: “Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God”. I wonder how many of you have ever noticed it or have ever wondered what it means. It comes from The Book of Ecclesiastes, the most philosophical book of the Old Testament, a book which belongs to a form of ancient literature known as Wisdom Literature.

There are, of course, many things that escape our attention and many things that puzzle and confuse us. They are often things which are set before us for our reflective consideration. It belongs to our wisdom, collectively and individually, to ponder them. Not every thing is simple and self-evident.

November is the grey month of our remembering. There is the remembering of All Saints’, signaling our vocation in the perfection and unity of our humanity in the Trinity of God. There is the remembering of All Souls’ in our common passing, the mortality which confronts us all. There is the secular or civil remembering of all those who gave their lives in the great conflicts of the 20th century, a bloody and terrible century, for the sake of the rational freedoms of our political and social life, if indeed we are worthy of such things.

These remembrances have in them an inescapably contemplative quality. In one way or another, we contemplate our end; our end, that is to say, in the sense of purpose. What are we here for, individually and collectively? This sense of end or purpose appears in the Scripture readings at this time of the year which have a contemplative quality to them. We are reading from books, either within or without the canonical Scriptures, which are generally known as Wisdom Literature.

(more…)

Print this entry