Year: 2015

“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.

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“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”

‘Why we need hell?’ might be an apt title for this sermon. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us nor to make us appreciate heaven as the desperate alternative to the usual parade of human miseries. No. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, Hell is about getting exactly what you want, only as it truly is, which is not the same thing as what we think we want. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning” and have not repented.

But the Word which comes to us is, inescapably and necessarily, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word convicting and convincing our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, invariably, found wanting. “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” All our motives are tainted by self-love. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitation, something more is opened out to us. We seek something more. And so does God.

That something more is conveyed wondrously in the pageant of Scripture. Advent reminds us of the coming of God’s Word to us. That coming is threefold: a coming historically, in the ‘then’ of Christ’s coming in carne, in the flesh; a coming ab judicio, in the judgment which is past, future and yet ever present, because it is now and always; and, a coming in mente, in our minds to shape and order our desires. And these three ‘comings’ are all comings of God in and through his Word.

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