by CCW | 15 December 2013 14:32
A sermon, snowstorm notwithstanding! Hearing and seeing are the two most intellectual of the physical senses. We use the sense of sight and hearing as metaphors for understanding. “I see what you mean,” we may say to someone in conversation, meaning we understand what they are saying. “I hear you,” we might assert, suggesting much the same thing, an agreement or at least an acknowledgement about the meaning of what is being said.
In a way, such use of language is commonplace and every day. We forget perhaps how profound it is and how it speaks to the very features of our humanity that make us who we are. In the quiet darkness of Advent, we can learn again about the power of words that illumine our minds and encourage our hearts. It is the point of today’s Scriptures and signals the ministry of the Church. It is about preparing and making ready the way of the Lord in human hearts “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” that we may be found “an acceptable people in [God’s] sight.”
Our darkness brought into the light of God is part of the process of learning. Advent is the season of teaching. God as Word and Light “brings to light the hidden things of darkness” and “makes manifest the counsels of the hearts,” as Paul puts it. To what end? That “every one shall have praise of God.” It is not simply judgment but joy and salvation.
The light of Advent teaches us what God seeks for our humanity. That is part and parcel of the power of this Gospel reading and, by extension, part and parcel of the faithful ministry of “the ministers and stewards of [the] mysteries” of God. John the Baptist belongs to that pattern of prophetic preparation for the coming of Christ. He is in prison, the victim of the power politics of his day, a victim of speaking truth to power but, as such, a martyr and a witness to the power and truth of God. His questions illuminate the dark landscape of Advent. His questions point us to Jesus. “Art thou he that should come, or do we seek for another?”
He knows only too well the dark ways of the world. That is the context of his looking to God and to the redemption of our humanity in the Saviour. What does that mean? Exactly what Jesus says: “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see.” What are those things? Everything that belongs to the truth of our redeemed humanity, to the ultimate perfection of our humanity, healed and restored, forgiven and ennobled, and all by the Word and Light of God coming into the darkness of our world and day. “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.” I always feel a bit sorry for the poor here! Yet, it is a wonderful collection of images about the redemption of our humanity, about our finding wholeness and salvation in Christ’s redemptive work. We are defined not by our brokenness but by the grace of Christ.
In our skeptical and cynical age we hear these words but do not grasp their meaning. If it is not literally the case for each of us or for those about whom we are most concerned, then it is not true. We are often blind, deaf, lame, leprous, dead, and poor in our understanding of God’s Word and Will for our humanity.
Because it is altogether about the meaning of what is heard and seen. The meaning is that God seeks our good which can only be found in him. It can’t be found in the passing things of this world. It can only be found in his eternal Word with us. The ministers and stewards of God’s mysteries are charged with being faithful in pointing us to Jesus, to our life in Christ, God’s eternal Word and Son. The miracles of healing in the Gospels point not to the continuation of life here and now but to our abiding in the eternal will of God. The Gospel opens us out to something more, the hope of heaven, to the truth of our lives in Christ, now and forever. What shall that be like is our prosaic question to which there is no answer other than to say that it is more than what we can desire or deserve, more than what we can imagine. Yet it is about what we are given to hear and see in these images of the fullness and the completeness of our humanity, forgiven and healed.
The idea of salvation addresses the negative reality of the human experience. It names it as negative and recalls us to the positive will of God for our humanity. We can ignore and deny it, of course, but that leaves us in a kind of contradiction. We are beings who seem to have no being or at least are utterly unable to account for our being. We want to be ourselves and to seek what is best for us only to confront our decay and our demise. Is there nothing more to us than the negatives of suffering and death? If so, then we are only the blind, the lame, the deaf, the leprous and the poor; in short, dead. Our life is meaningless, an illusion and a despairing darkness. Nothing is but what is not.
To the contrary, Jesus says to us what he says to the disciples of John the Baptist. “Go and tell John again those things which ye do hear and see,” the things that belong to the healing and the restoration of our humanity to God for “then shall every man have praise of God.” Our truth is found in the praise of God and not in the praises of ourselves in our narcissism and nihilism. In ourselves we are nothing; it is in God that we find our wholeness and salvation. “Turn us again, O God; show us the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole,” as we heard in the gradual psalm (Ps. 80. 3).
In the great Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest literary work known to our humanity, Gilgamesh comes to terms with his mortality through the death of his friend, Enkidu. It leads him on a quest, a quest for meaning, for wisdom. He learns about the truth and the power of the other, the friend, even in the face of a dark and foreboding world where there is always the fear of chaos. Even the absence of the friend teaches him about the importance of others. Only so can he return to Uruk as king and hero.
The work ends with the words, “great is thy praise.” Not the praise of the gods for whom the humans are merely a nuisance and nothing worth. For the humans the gods are not truly praiseworthy – they belong to the fearful uncertainty of a hostile and indifferent world that threatens our humanity. Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, had wanted Gilgamesh for her boy-toy; he refused, knowing that she turns all her lovers into animals. In his quest for meaning, he finds Utnapishtim, the Noah of the Sumerian world, who alone escaped the flood, and has been given everlasting life, but he finds him living alone with his wife at the end of the world. In each case there is a loss of our humanity; either we are turned into animals or dwell in a kind of lonely emptiness.
These images contrast with what the Scriptures open out to us through the witness of the one whom Jesus says is “a prophet … and yet more than a prophet” precisely because of what we are given to hear and see about Christ. They are all the things that belong to the meaning and the truth of our humanity, a meaning and a truth found in Him and in our praises of God.
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, 2013
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