by CCW | 24 November 2019 15:00
This Sunday marks the turning of the year, a time of endings and beginnings. “To make an end,” as T.S. Eliot observes, “is to make a beginning” for “the end is where we start from.” He means an end in the sense of a first principle. Metanoia is repentance. It signals our turning back to the One from whom we have turned away. But literally, metanoia is ‘a thinking after,’ our thinking after the things of God. It is an axiom of thought that a first principle cannot be demonstrated by anything prior to it but rather by showing that everything after it is radically dependent upon it. This Sunday reminds us that our turning to God is entirely dependent upon God’s turning to us.
In a way, it is about two kinds of intellectual or spiritual motion: a motion to and from a first principle, God. Both motions depend upon the absolute priority of God in his motion towards us and in him moving us back to himself. Advent marks the beginning of that first motion; the Trinity season signals the project of the second. The one focuses on what is properly referred to as justification; the second upon sanctification; in short, Christ for us and Christ in us. Together they belong to the dynamic of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ.
“From Advent through to Trinity Sunday,” Dean Anthony Sparrow (1655) says, “we run through the Creed,” through the principles that belong to human redemption as distilled and articulated in the classical Creeds of the Christian Faith. The Creeds themselves are the distillation of the essential teachings of the Scriptures about our life in faith. But “from Trinity Sunday through to Advent,” he says, “the Creed runs through us.” Both motions are interrelated: God’s turning to us and our turning to God, his turning to us in revelation and his turning us back to himself; in short, the coming of God as Word to us and our abiding with that Word.
For centuries, this Sunday was called The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity but was also used and known by way of a rubric as The Sunday Next Before Advent. For regardless of the number of Sundays after Trinity, which varies from year to year owing to the date of Easter, the fifth Sunday before Christmas is always The Sunday Next Before Advent. And for centuries upon centuries, the Gospel reading on this day was John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a story which is also read on The Fourth Sunday in Lent. In each case it is read with a different purpose. Its theme on this Sunday was about the “gather[ing] up of the fragments that remain that nothing be lost” – a kind of reflection upon the nature of our spiritual progress throughout the Trinity Season – and about the miracle as sign that Jesus is “that Prophet that should come into the world,” an Advent theme about the coming of Christ.
Perhaps because it is read in mid-Lent, the modern Canadian revision of 1962 changed the Gospel reading to what you heard this morning, again from John’s Gospel, about the disciples of John following Jesus and Jesus turning to them. His turning marks the beginning of the possibilities of our turning to him, to our being with him and to the progress of his grace in us. “Come and see,” Jesus says in relation to their question: “Rabbi, where dwellest thou?” That itself is a question in response to Jesus’ first question which is actually the first form of direct speech by Jesus in John’s Gospel. The question speaks to our souls, “What seek ye?” What do we desire? Advent is about awakening our desire for God. It is about the stirring up of our wills in faith, to put it in the language of the Collect. Seeing and abiding with what we come to know are necessarily and intimately connected.
Our relation to God as the principle of our lives can never be static and passive. It is always about God active and alive for us and in us. Advent marks the beginning of the pageant of God’s Word and Son coming to us. It is about our being awakened to that principle upon which our knowing and being radically depend. We come to the end of the Trinity season at once looking back and taking account of ourselves but also with a renewed sense of beginning again. We are enfolded in the mystery of God’s love coming to us and moving in us, a mystery which is always more and greater than what we can measure.
Advent is the wonder of God’s Word coming as light into the darkness of our world and day and into the darkness of our hearts. What is revealed to us is what is also to be known in us. Our own self-awakening depends utterly upon God’s absolute self-consciousness. Such is God the Trinity in whom memory, understanding, and will are perfectly united, unlike in us, and utterly without confusion, again quite unlike us. The journey of our lives is about the discovery of ourselves as being made in God’s image, thus the realization that our self-consciousness is utterly dependent upon that principle of divine self-consciousness. What is there for faith in the pageant of God’s Word is there for our understanding and for our growth in understanding. “The end is where we start from.” We begin and end with Christ who bids us “come and see,” the one who gathers up the fragments of our broken lives that nothing be lost, that all be gathered back to him from whom all things come.
The last poem in George Herbert’s remarkable collection of poems known as the Temple is “Love (III)”. It captures beautifully the nature of this dynamic interplay between seeing and abiding with what we see, between justification and sanctification. It begins:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
Already there is a certain sense of self-awareness, the awareness of our shortcomings and failings which is only possible through an awareness, however incomplete, of God.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d any thing.
Jesus turns and asks the disciples, “what seek ye?” Love “drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, / If I lack’d any thing.” “A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:”
The soul’s answer corresponds to the disciples in both Gospel stories in the recognition of a desire for something more than what we can acquire for ourselves. But “Love said, You shall be he.” We are invited to be guests at the banquet of divine love, but the soul replies, “I the unkinde, the ungrateful? Ah, my deare, / I cannot look on thee.”
This is the soul’s actual confession following upon its initial sense of contrition or sorrow in the awareness of the gap between what we are and what we seek. What next?
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Jesus turned, Jesus speaks, and asks about what we seek. There are things which God wants us to know. Love made us for himself and so for our entering into the knowledge of his love for us. Here in this most moving and profound image is the sweet gentleness of wisdom in God’s turning to us to draw us to the truth of our being and our knowing. “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/ Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth Lord,” the soul says in truth, “ but I have marr’d them: let my shame/Go where it doth deserve.” The soul remains conscious of its faults and failings but the turning of God to us in Jesus, in love, means something more than remaining simply in ourselves as “dust and sinne.” Such things are less than what we are in God’s sight. And so we are reminded of the principle of divine self-consciousness upon which our self-consciousness depends.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
Here is the principle of justification the pageant of which Advent inaugurates, showing us God’s deep love for our humanity in the life of Christ, the incarnate, crucified, risen and ascended Lord. By his stripes we are healed. He bears our sins in himself in the body he takes from us to offer in himself what to offer unto God for us. This can only move the soul to the desire to serve. “My dear, then I will serve.”
Our life is our service to God. Such is prayer. It is all the service that we ever do unto God. But God seeks something more for us than servitude. The whole pageant of redemption is about liberation. Jesus famously says, “ye are my friends” and no longer servants. There is something much more intimate.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
We are fed in the wilderness journey. Jesus bids the men sit down, in number above five thousand. The fragments that are gathered up are more than enough to sustain us. The divine intent is that “nothing be lost.” A wonderful fragment from a lost play of Euripides says, “Never that which is shall die.” The poem and the gospel readings on this day bid us “come and see” and “to sit and eat;” they are at once eucharistical and eschatological. The times of transition awaken us to the turnings of God to us and in us, to the radical nature of our life in Christ.
Fr. David Curry
The Sunday Next Before Advent, 2019
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