Advent Meditation and Sermon for the Commemoration of St. Nicholas
“Blessed are those servants,
whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”
Advent is the season of watching and waiting. In our Advent meditations we are watching and waiting upon the meaning of Revelation as the counter to Gnosticism which underlies two of the earliest heresies – false teachings – of the early Church, Docetism and Marcionism. Last week we considered Docetism which is an explicit denial of the Incarnation because of its gnostic dualism which regards the material and physical world as something intrinsically evil as opposed to and distinct from the spiritual which is good. Thus redemption can only be a flight from the physical and the material. All of the accounts of Christ’s birth and crucifixion are subsequently regarded as fiction, as mere appearance, a kind of seeming, hence the word, docetism, from the Greek meaning to seem to be or appear.
The most explicit counter to Docetism in the New Testament is found in the Gospel of St. John in the idea of “the Word was made flesh” which is the great Christmas Gospel and in his first Epistle in such things as “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the Word of life” which echoes and affirms the Christmas Gospel and which is read in the Christmas holy days on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (Dec. 27th). This suggests something of the importance of the writings of John in the formation of the canon of the New Testament, the coming to be of the collection of gospels, letters, and other writings such as Acts and Revelation that comprise the Christian Scriptures but always, interestingly enough, in tandem with the Jewish or Hebrew Scriptures.
Paradoxically, Mariconism is actually the first canon of Scripture, the first attempt to say what Scriptures should be included and read and which ones should not. This is where our attention turns to the idea of Revelation and to the necessity of thinking about what we read and how we read. Marcion was a figure from the second century, c. 144 AD, who looked at the writings of the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, as well as at many of the writings of what would come to be part of the New Testament. Some things he liked, other things he didn’t. What he didn’t like he simply threw out. What he liked he kept in. Upon what basis? That is the interesting question, an important question.
