by CCW | 15 December 2019 15:00
John the Baptist and Mary the Blessed Virgin are essential figures in the spiritual landscape of Advent. They meet together, as it were, on the Third Sunday in Advent and illumine the nature of what it means to be “the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.” They do so through the conjunction of repentance and rejoicing.
What is the ministry of John the Baptist? It is the ministry of “preaching a gospel of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” as Mark and Luke tell us and to which Matthew also alludes. What does that mean? It means a form of self-awareness, an awareness of our faults and failings which is predicated upon the desire for wholeness or righteousness in us; in short, for truth. It complements Mary’s fiat mihi which is about being defined by the Word of God’s truth coming to her and through her to us. Repentance leads to joy, to the note of rejoicing signaled on this Sunday which is also known as “Gaudete” Sunday from the Introit taken from Philippians (and which also is the Epistle for next Sunday) and symbolised with the rose candle on the Advent wreath. “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice.” And why? Because “the Lord is at hand.”
But why is John in prison? Matthew only tells us several chapters later. He dared to speak truth to power. There is a confusion of Herods in the New Testament, all part of the Herodian dynasty, all related to Herod the Great of the Christmas story. Herodias was first the wife of Philip, also a Herod, but divorced him to marry his more powerful brother, Herod Antipas, who in turn divorced his wife to marry her. Herodias’ name is itself a feminine form of Herod. She was a Jewish princess with great ambitions but marrying Herod Antipas, whom Matthew calls, somewhat confusingly, Herod the Tetrarch, caused an outrage since it was a violation of Jewish law for a man to marry his brother’s divorced wife. As Matthew tells us, it was John the Baptist who said to him “It is not lawful for you to have her,” and so he was put in prison.
This leads to the famous story of the beheading of John the Baptist through the connivance of Herodias and her daughter Salome. Salome dances so pleasingly before Herod Antipas that he promised to give her whatever she wanted. Herodias prompts her to say, “the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The story has captured the imagination of many artists such as Caravaggio, Titian, and Artemisia Gentileschi, to name but a few. The phrase “one’s head on a platter” has become an idiomatic and hyperbolic expression for a very harsh punishment. Indeed. Obviously there is nothing new about our contemporary questions about “constitutional legitimacy” (quoting Habermas) or about ethical corruption in what Maclean’s calls our disordered world.
But here in today’s Gospel we have the strongest possible affirmation of the ministry of John the Baptist and its significance for us in the pilgrimage of Advent. John sends two of his disciples to Jesus with the question, “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” He is seeking the truth and righteousness of God. That is at the heart of his ministry. Jesus’ answer awakens us to what God seeks for us in his Advent to us. “Go and tell John again, those things which ye do see and hear: 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,” words which are included in the Bidding Prayer of the Advent Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. They reveal to us the nature of redemption: it is nothing less than the wholeness and the restoration of our broken humanity. This is what John the Baptist seeks at the heart of his ministry; truth and righteousness in the awareness of our ignorance and sin. It means a commitment to truth and righteousness. “And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”
Jesus then turns to us as it were, addressing “the multitude concerning John.” He highlights the importance of the ministry of John the Baptist as the messenger sent to prepare the way of the Lord, the one who is “a prophet” and yet “more than a prophet.” In a torrent of questions, Jesus challenges us precisely about what we seek. What do we truly desire? He is suggesting that John the Baptist points us to the truth. “What went ye out for to see?” he asks with increasing intensity because it is about nothing less than what God wants for us, truth and rightness, which is the ultimate and only Good for us. Not something of passing moment, “a reed shaken with the wind[s]” of the world. Not “a man clothed in soft raiment” in the passing comforts of the world. But a prophet and more than a prophet, the one who brings the whole pageant of prophetic insight to its fulfillment. Jesus is the truth we seek.
The ministry of John the Baptist awakens us to that seeking of the will and truth of God for our humanity just as Mary embraces God’s Word to let it take flesh in her and through her for us. “The Lord is at hand.”
Repentance and rejoicing go hand in hand. Such are the anticipatory joys of Advent that awaken us to truth and the desire for truth in our lives. “What went ye out for to see?” It is one of the great questions for our world in despair and darkness. The tragedy of our age is the sad absence of a desire, the lack of a passion to see and know, to think and feel; in short, to be alive. It is almost as if we are afraid of knowing and have retreated into the ghettoes of our minds but having left our minds outside the door. “All men by nature desire to know,” Aristotle famously says, picking up on Plato’s eros, the passionate desire to know. They are right, it seems to me, at least in the sense of identifying a fundamental and essential feature of our humanity yet one which is much in question in the anti-intellectualism of our age where an instrumental logic dominates, diminishes and destroys us. In our cultural relativism we default to power over truth. We forget that knowing is linked inescapably to ethics, to our living in relation to what we know, in some sense or another, as truth, each in accord with our capacities to know. I don’t mean ‘your truth’ or ‘my truth’; such are the sophistries of our age which deny exactly what they assume. Advent is about the wisdom of God which is the condition of all human knowing and life.
We are recalled to the omnipresence of God’s Truth at once always present and always coming to us. Such are the ministries of repentance and rejoicing, the ministries of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Repent and rejoice!
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, 2019
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