by CCW | 11 December 2016 15:00
In the deepening darkness of nature’s year – not to mention the deep coldness of December! – we await the light of God coming to us. Such is the Advent of Christ. Our waiting is not something passive and static. Advent is about our being prepared for the one who comes. How? By way of “ministers and stewards of the mysteries of God” who are likened to “thy messenger”, the one sent to prepare the way of Christ before him. That messenger is John the Baptist and he is one of the two major figures of the Advent landscape of faith especially on The Third Sunday of Advent. The other is Mary. They both belong to the preparations for Christ’s coming.
John is vox clamatis in deserto, “a voice crying in the wilderness”, in Isaiah’s rich imaginary. Yet, here in Matthew’s gospel we are made aware of another kind of darkness, another kind of wilderness. It is neither the darkness nor the wilderness of nature; it is the darkness and the wilderness of human sin. Here John cries out from prison, a victim or victor, too, we might say, of those who speak truth to power. Matthew does not tell us right away why John is in prison but later reveals that it was because he denounced Herod for marrying his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. This leads to the infamous scene of the daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod on his birthday who “promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask.” “Prompted by her mother,” Matthew tells us, “she said, ‘Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter’”. And so it was done. We know “the daughter of Herodias” as Salome only from the first century Jewish historian Josephus. She is unnamed in the Gospels.
Knowing the fuller story of John the Baptist only adds to the poignancy of the Gospel. John is the great prophet; indeed, Jesus says “more than a prophet” precisely because everything in his life points to the coming of Christ, both his wondrous nativity and his death under persecution. Here Jesus points us to John the Baptist, pointing us to the ministry of preparation, awakening us to the meaning of the one who comes. How? Through the back and forth, the to and fro of questions. “Art thou he that should come,” John asks from prison through his disciples, “or do we look for another?” The question is not rhetorical; it is genuine. There are always uncertainties and confusions. “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” Mary asks the Angel of the Annunciation. The questions are pertinent. They belong to our active waiting upon the coming of God’s Word, then and now. The task of “the ministers of Christ and the stewards of the mysteries of God” is to point us faithfully to God’s judgment. He alone “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then shall every man have praise of God.”
The Angel of the Annunciation tells Mary that “the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” “That holy thing,” a neutral gender counter to our gender confusions, perhaps, and yet nothing less than “the Son of God”. Through the dialectic – the thinking through it kind of reasoning – we enter into the mystery of God’s engagement with our humanity. “Art thou he that should come?” John asks, echoing the Advent question on The First Sunday of Advent when “all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?” Jesus answers John’s disciples with what are perhaps ‘the Beatitudes of the Advent’, words which open us out to the radical meaning of the redemption of our humanity. They have altogether to do with our yearning and longing for meaning and healing, for wholeness and salvation. It comes down to a vision of the perfection and truth of our humanity as found in our being with God, the God who wills to be with us. It means the “bring[ing] to light the hidden things of darkness” and the “mak[ing] manifest the counsels of the hearts”, namely, what we truly seek and desire. Only then, “shall every one have praise of God.”
The Advent Beatitudes are what Christ comes to bring. They are “those things”, Jesus says, “which ye do hear and see.” What are those blessednesses? The things heard and seen in the witness of the Scriptures proclaimed in the faithfulness of the Church, in the pageant of Word and Sacrament. “Guarda e escolta”, Beatrice commands the pilgrim Dante in the earthly paradise of the Purgatorio, itself the image of our lives in the pilgrimage of “faith seeking understanding”. Look and listen, she says. To what? To the pageant of sacramental revelation, to the very thing which belongs to the wonder of the Advent season in the liturgy of the Church. Only so shall we be made “pure and prepared to leap up to the stars”. We hear and see the blessings which Christ comes to bring. Matthew’s words of Christ inform, for instance, the great Advent Bidding Prayer that belongs to the famous Service of Nine Lessons and Carols inaugurated in 1918 at King’s College, Cambridge, explicitly naming the Advent Beatitudes, if you will. What are they?
“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 blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” Advent is about the light which comes to a dark and despairing world, our world. Our healing and our good are found in God’s engagement with our humanity, in his life alight and alive in us. Yet for that to happen there has to be the awakening of a desire for something more in us for without that we are but the prisoners of our own despair, our own darkness and folly. That is why we need the questions of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. They open us out to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming.
Jesus makes this very clear, I think, in the questions which he puts to the multitudes concerning John. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see? … But what went ye out for to see? … but what went ye out for to see?” His question is asked with threefold intensity. He speaks to us about our desiring, about our wanting something more and pointing out that what we seek are not the riches that belong to a world of material comforts. No. We seek what prophecy opens out to us, an insight into the greater blessings of God who seeks the radical good of our humanity which cannot simply be found in wearing soft clothing or living in the houses of kings.
The questions of Advent impel us to seek the kingdom of God. They do so through these things heard and seen that prepare and make ready God’s way in us. How? “By turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” so that “we may be found an acceptable people in God’s sight” as today’s Collect beautifully puts it. We are being shown what God seeks for our humanity without which we remain in the prison wilderness and darkness of our own hearts. Advent is the divine preparation for Christ’s coming. It is the divine preparation in us if we will hear and see. If we will let it be “according to thy Word”.
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/12/11/sermon-for-the-third-sunday-in-advent-5/
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