“A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet”
We live in the meantime between the already and the not yet, between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. Advent prepares us not just for Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem but also for his coming again in glory at the end of time. “He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end,” we just professed in the Nicene Creed. And in the Apostles’ Creed, Christ “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” And more fully, and perhaps more disturbingly, the Athanasian Creed proclaims that Christ “Ascended into heaven, sat down at the right hand of the Father,/ from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead./ At whose coming all men must rise again with their bodies,/ and shall give account for their own deeds./ And they that have done good will go into life eternal;/ they that have done evil into eternal fire.” Wow! We probably don’t want to hear this and yet it belongs to the great good news of the Gospel. It is what is prayed in the great Eucharistic prayer, “remembering the precious death of thy beloved Son, his mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension,” things that are already, but then “looking for his coming again in glory,” to what is not yet.
That there is judgment means there is truth; that there is judgment means that our thoughts, words and deeds mean something.
All these creedal and liturgical statements are scriptural. They reflect a recurring theme about God’s engagement with our humanity and about the redemption of our humanity in Christ. The judgment, as today’s Epistle makes clear is God’s judgment, not mine, not yours, come what may in the experiences of tyranny and corruption, disorder and disarray, death and destruction in our world and day.
The Collect for today draws directly upon the Epistle and makes explicit the connection between the first coming and the second coming, locating the theme of preparation in relation to both to what is already and what is not yet. “O Lord Jesus Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee,” the Collect begins, picking up on the theme of the Gospel about the ministry of John the Baptist. That ministry becomes part and parcel of the ministry of the Church in “prepar[ing] and mak[ing] ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight.”
“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot observes, once in The Four Quartets (Burnt Norton), and again in Murder in the Cathedral. It may be that this is an instance of the kind of reality we find difficult to bear. And yet it belongs to the truth of God’s being with us. We live in the meantime between the already and the not yet.
But how? How can we bear the reality of judgment? The Gospel shows us. It comprises three scenes that illuminate at once the ministry of John the Baptist and the truth of God’s coming in Christ. We live in the truth of both. The first scene is John the Baptist’s question about Jesus to his disciples while in prison, the victim of the tyranny of Herod for having spoken truth to power. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” he asks, sending two of his disciples to Jesus. What another? Another Messiah. But what kind of a Messiah? Our culture and day continues to look for political and economic Messiahs whether self-proclaimed or anointed by our wishes and desires. They all fail, as they must. The kingdom of God is not of our making. It has to be us with God and at his word and will.
The second scene is the encounter between Jesus and the disciples of John and focuses on Jesus’ response, a response which crystallizes the meaning of Christ’s coming. It identifies the purpose of his coming, the purpose of the Incarnation. It illumines what remains with us in the meantime with Christ in his Church. “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see: 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.” Wonderful words which speak directly to the vison of redeemed humanity, to our end with God. But that is not all. Jesus adds, “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” The redemption of our humanity is accomplished in Christ’s saving work. Our task is to make that redemption visible in our lives in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice. It belongs to the living truth of the liturgy, to our living sacrificial lives. As the final prayer in the Communion Service so beautifully puts it, “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,” full knowing our own failings, our own unworthiness. This is living in the judgment between what is already and what is not yet.
In the third scene, Christ addresses the multitudes who had apparently followed John into the wilderness, those who had attended to his ministry of repentance as preparation for the coming of the Messiah. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asks them about John the Baptist, and he repeats the question with threefold intensity, “what went ye out for to see?” I love the piling up of prepositions! Jesus is calling attention to the ministry of John which points to him. “A prophet?” Is that what you thought you were following, Jesus is asking, and goes on to make the profound point that John is a prophet and yet “more than a prophet” for he stands at the point of the fulfillment of all prophecy. John is the messenger sent to “prepare thy way before thee.” John is the prophet who has insight into what is.
That remains an aspect of the ministry of the Church in the meantime between the already of Christ’s first coming and the not yet of his second coming. The second coming of Christ, a feature of Scriptural and Creedal doctrine, is not about the assertion of our salvation, as in the question “are you saved?” It is about the salvation of our humanity, individually and collectively proclaimed and accomplished in Jesus Christ. We live in the now of what is already accomplished. The when of his Second Coming at the end of time is, like our own deaths, not known, “for no man knoweth the hour.” To presume that we do so is utter folly.
A reality too hard to bear? And yet this is the counter to the despairing nihilisms of our world and day, to the endism of disaster films, to the constant parade of our eco-environmental pessimisms, to the end of the earth either by way of some wayward asteroid or the heat-death of entropy some trillions of trillions of years from now. No. Here is the vision not of destruction but of redemption and of the means by which we participate in that here and now, in the liturgy of the Church where Christ is present and in the living out of our faith in lives of penitential adoration. The whole point of the ministry of the Church is expressed in the Collect: “grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way” the way of God in us, “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.” It is a life-long project but in the light of Christ, “the hidden things of darkness” are named and known, the truth of our hearts made manifest and then, as the Epistle puts it, “then shall every man have praise of God.”
Therein lies our end and the meaning of the coming of Christ, now, in the already of his first coming and, then, in the not yet of his second coming. The teaching is there for us to bear in Christ, in the truth of his being with us and in the hope, the reasonable hope, of being with him everlastingly. The teaching is wonderfully signaled in a passage from St. Augustine which helps us to bear this reality.
There we shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end which shall not end. For what other end do we have, if not to reach the kingdom which has no end?
The one who is a prophet and yet more than a prophet prepares us. Such is the royal way of Advent in the meantime between what is already and what is not yet.
“A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2014