Behold, I send my messenger … which shall prepare thy way before thee
Advent is the season of penitential preparation for the celebration of Christmas. Repentance and rejoicing go hand in hand. Both these tonal qualities of spiritual life belong to the theme of preparation signalled so directly in the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for this day and heralded so profoundly in the second Exhortation which you heard this morning. Advent celebrates the motion of God’s Word coming to us in judicio, in judgement, in mente, in mind, and, ultimately, in carne, in the flesh. That motion is all God towards us; all grace, we might say. The important point of Advent is that grace can never be taken for granted. It requires our attention, our loving attention upon the motions of God’s Word coming to usand being with us. It requires preparation on our part to receive that Word in its glory and truth. Only so is it grace to us.
The preparation is all grace, to be sure, but it concerns our mindfulness of that grace. That is the point of the Exhortation, so rarely read and heard. We are in Advent and yet always “in the mean season”, always in anticipation and expectation of things which remain to be more fully realized in us. As such we are bidden “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery”, the Sacrament of the Altar, “and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof.” Devout preparation. It belongs to “the ministers and stewards of [those] mysteries” to “prepare and make ready thy way”, the way of God, in all our hearts “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just”. Such is repentance. It is about our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away. It is simply about our complete surrender of ourselves to God’s will for our humanity. Thus the witness of John the Baptist about repentance is wonderfully complemented by witness of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose ‘yes’ to God belongs so completely to the mystery of the Incarnation.
Today’s Gospel calls our attention to the ministry of John the Baptist even as this week also reminds us of the Annunciation to Mary as an essential part of the Advent. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, is Mary’s mantra and the mantra of the Church universal in all times and seasons but especially in this season of the coming of God Incarnate, itself the crystallization of all of the motions of God’s Word coming to us. The preparation is about our mindfulness. It means, as the Exhortation suggests, a certain kind of self-examination, a matter of the inward spirit, a matter of conscience and soul-searching to the intent of the quieting of all our doubts and fears, of all our anxieties and worries, by recalling us to trust in God. The second Exhortationis very precise about what such examination means in terms of seeking reconciliation with one another as belonging to the “full purpose of amendment of life.”
It calls us to account so that we may indeed “reverence the holy mysteries of thy body and blood” and so perceive “within ourselves the fruits of thy redemption” as the Collect for Maundy Thursday so powerfully puts it. Just as the first Exhortation recalls us to the Proper Preface for Passiontide, so, too, the second Exhortation recalls us to Holy Week and to the theme of the wedding garment or marriage garment in the late Trinity season: “so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture” without which we cannot “be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.” Our worthiness does not lie in ourselves but only in our trust in God which is the burden of the Prayer of Humble Access. “We do not presume to come to this thy Table … trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies.” Wonderful words.
And yet there is always the danger that such Exhortations to such preparations only add to an anxiety and a spirit of being overly scrupulous, overthinking ourselves or thinking too much about ourselves rather than keeping our focus on what God seeks for us. Such is the danger of the doctrine of assurance which is easily misconstrued by placing all the emphasis upon our feelings about ourselves rather than our trust in the goodness of God. Our good, our perfection, as it were, is not and cannot be a human construct. We are called to Another, the One who comes, in whom, as Jesus says, there is healing and wholeness. That ultimately is the point of John’s question. “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” Jesus’ response to John’s disciples is precise: “Go and tell John again those things which ye do hear and see”. And what are those things? “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 used in the great Advent Bidding Prayer in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, they speak to the darkness of our world and day, to the darkness of our humanity.
The burden of today’s Gospel is about the place of John the Baptist in the economy, in the working out, of human redemption. Here Jesus says something extraordinary. He defines completely the ministry of John the Baptist. It is the ministry of preparation by way of repentance. John is his messenger, he says, quoting Isaiah, literally, an angel, for that is the meaning of angels – they are the messengers of God. As such it complements the role of Mary, the theotokos, the God-bearer, the one in whom Christ becomes incarnate because of her fiat mihi, her “be it unto me,” in response to the Angel of the Advent, Gabriel. That, too, is preparation, indeed of the highest and purest sort. Mary yields completely the whole of her being to the will of God in whom we find the truth of our being. Thus Mary and John the Baptist are the quintessential figures of the Advent. They point us to Christ and to the divine preparations which God makes in and through us for his coming to us.
Messengers, ministers and stewards are not just the clergy but through them all of us are called to be messengers, ministers and stewards of the mysteries of God each in our own way. The divine preparations for those holy mysteries require our attention and mindfulness, our commitment and service both for ourselves and for one another in the body of Christ, the Church. It is “an easy matter” to excuse ourselves from receiving communion, the Exhortation notes, pleading our own “worldly business” or busyness! To know ourselves as “grievous sinners” is only sincere if it is followed with repentance and amendment of life in the recognition that it is our “duty to receive the holy Communion.”
To plead our unworthiness as an excuse is to remain trapped in ourselves, in our own self-willfulness, literally placing ourselves before God and his will for us declared so directly and clearly in the Gospel of Christ. In so doing we separate ourselves from one another, from our brethren. We separate ourselves from the body of Christ because we refuse the preparations of the Gospel. The awakening to conscience means exactly what the Exhortation bids us: “to prepare yourselves, and to come to feed upon the banquet of this most heavenly Food.” Our liturgy is itself part of that preparation through the rhythms of contrition, confession and satisfaction which turn us to Christ and to his presence with us. Such really is our joy and our good; a rejoicing in repentance for such is the preparation of the way of Christ in us.
Behold, I send my messenger … which shall prepare thy way before thee
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2018