“What went ye out for to see?”
Jesus asks with threefold intensity, “what went ye out for to see?” He is speaking about John the Baptist, one of the outstanding figures of the landscape of Advent. About him Jesus says he is “more than a prophet.” He is the one sent “to prepare the way of the Lord.” Advent is all about the preparations for Christ’s coming.
Yet what a strange and a beguiling figure John the Baptist is! Angels and bells, culturally and certainly biblically, often signal messages and warnings. We had occasion this week past to bury Bert Galley, the long-standing and faithful bell-ringer of Christ Church for so many, many years. Yet, angels and bells, as it were, are here wrapped in “camel’s hair with a girdle of leather about his waist and eating locusts and wild honey”. For such is the rather forbidding picture which we are given of John the Baptist, the great prophet of the Advent of Christ. He is vox clamatis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, even more a voice crying from prison, “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Somehow the Advent message of John the Baptist has a powerful and poignant intensity at the point where he is questioning his own life and ministry.
What is that life and ministry? He came, as Mark tells us, “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” He came, as John tells us, teaching that “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” His whole ministry is a ministry of deference: “he must increase, but I must decrease”, he says about Christ and himself. He is not the Christ. He is not the forgiveness of sins. But he is the essential preparation for the coming of Christ whom he identifies to us as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” We are, it seems, totally caught up in the motions and the mystery of God coming to us, in part through the ministry of John the Baptist.
He is the counter to the soft indulgence and easy complacency of our world and day, a world defined by material comforts and sensual pleasures or at least a desire for such things. A figure of ascetic rigour, he is defined by a fierce and uncompromising commitment to the things of the spirit, a figure of the desert who challenges us about the meaning and direction of our human lives. What do we live for? For our creaturely comforts? Or for the righteousness of God which perfects and gives meaning to our human lives? There is little that is comforting, perhaps, about John the Baptist in our modern sense of comfort. There is everything that is strengthening for us, perhaps, in his message; the older sense of comfort as strengthening us in the things that really matter.
The greater point is that in him prophecy has its truest fulfillment, complemented perfectly by that other essential figure of the landscape of Advent and of Christmas, Mary, the Blessed Virgin and Mother, the one through whom God becomes man, the paradigm of God’s fullest and truest engagement with our humanity. Joy goes hand in hand, it seems, with the message of repentance, something which the rose candle on the Advent wreath especially reminds us.
John the Baptist belongs to the necessary preparations for the advent of Christ by awakening us to the reality of the things of the spirit. He arrests our attention and draws the world out after him into the desert. “What went ye out for to see?” Jesus asks us, underscoring by the triple intensity of his question, the importance and the wonder of the world in the desert. The world is in the desert seeking what John the Baptist seeks and highlights as the absolute necessity for the world – a righteousness which it does not have in itself and which it can only have through repentance. That is our world, too, the world in the desert of darkness and despair and yet, through the ministry of John the Baptist and, by extension, the ministry of the Church, there is repentance that comes from the awakening of desire. A world in the desert desiring the light of God’s truth and love.
Here, in this morning’s Gospel, John is in another kind of wilderness. He is in prison, asking about the one who has come. “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” Our looking, our seeking, our desiring and our wanting have in them just that quality of anxiety and uncertainly. The response, however, is compelling and brings out the purpose of John’s ministry of preparation, the true nature of his desiring and, ultimately, of ours. What are we looking for?
What is “the baptism of repentance”? What does “going into the wilderness” mean? They mean the strong desire for the redemption of our wounded and broken humanity. We can only seek that wholeness out of the awareness of our hunger and need for something beyond the easy complacencies of our world. “A reed shaken in the wind”, being “clothed in soft clothing”, even what we take to be the prophetic voices of our day, all these are far less and other than the ministry of John the Baptist. He is “more than a prophet” for he stands at the brink of the fulfillment of all prophecy. All prophecy has its fulfillment in Christ, in the very being of God with us in the very flesh of our humanity.
Is there an answer to John’s question? There is and it vindicates the ministry of John which Jesus wants us to celebrate. “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see”, Jesus says. And what are those things? Simply and wonderfully the things that belong to the restoration and redemption of our humanity. Simply the things that belong to the healing and the forgiveness of our wounded and weary world: “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, if that were not enough, and prophetically, too, it seems to me, “blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”
It is the picture of the harmony and the wholeness of our humanity at one with God and with the created order and at one even with one another, a vision of peace and joy, of harmony and salvation. It is what we hope to see at Christmas in every scene of Bethlehem, in the wonderful pageant of redemption in all its fullness that unfolds in the mystery of Christmas. And it is what we must hope to see in ourselves, in our souls, in our homes and families, community and world.
And yet, here is a further astounding thing. John the Baptist is not part of the Christmas scene. Unlike Mary, we rarely see him, if at all, in any of the artistic depictions of the nativity. Only the great Gospel of Christmas Eve identifies him by name as the one sent to bear witness of the light which he himself is not. In that profound meditation on the meaning of Christ’s birth, paradoxically it is Mary who is not named!
John is utterly and totally necessary to the meaning of Christmas, to the interplay of joy and repentance that so defines Advent. He is the preparation, the preparation of repentance without which we can make no sense of the peace and joy of Christ’s holy birth. His is the ministry of deference, deferring – giving place in every sense to Christ so much so that he is not in the Christmas picture. Yet he points us to the Christmas scene from afar, a figure from the desert pointing to the feast of truth and the paradise of love. He simply points us to Christ, here by his question that gives rise to Jesus’ response. He challenges us about the true desire of our humanity. It is precisely what Jesus would have us honour.
“What went ye out for to see?”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2015