Sermon for the Sunday Next Before Advent
Link to the audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Sunday Next Before Advent
“Then Jesus turned”
Times of transition are times of renewal. There is a wonderful and profound complementarity in the turning of Jesus to us in today’s Gospel and the repeated refrain of turning in the Introit and Gradual Psalm for this day. “Turn us, O God our Saviour,” and with greater intensity, “Wilt thou not turn again and quicken us, / that thy people may rejoice in thee?” In Psalm 80 appointed for Morning Prayer, we also pray that God may “turn us again”. It is a repeated refrain with an increasing degree of intensity culminating in the phrase, “turn us again, O Lord God of hosts;/show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” Jesus turns his countenance, his face, towards us and that both sums up the whole course of our lives and inaugurates a renewal of our lives in the God in whom we find our wholeness.
We neglect the wonder of this Gospel passage. It belongs to the beginning of John’s Gospel and yet we read it at the near end of the Christian year. In John’s Gospel it is the first time in which Jesus speaks to us directly. It is the directness of his address that is so compelling. Jesus steps out of the background and into the foreground of our lives. He is highlighted by John the Baptist: “Behold, the Lamb of God.” He is our ending and our beginning.
“In my beginning is my end,” begins T.S.Eliot’s poem East Coker in his Four Quartets yet it ends with “In my end is my beginning”. There is a necessary kind of reciprocity and interchange between endings and beginnings. As he puts it in Little Gidding, “The end is where we start from.” This states simply but profoundly a philosophical commonplace, especially in terms of Aristotelian causality. The end, purpose or goal, is the necessary starting point for the understanding of any and all forms of change and development, and for the understanding of what things are.
And so this Sunday marks an ending and a beginning. That is its wonder and its beauty. It is redire ad principia, a return to a principle, a kind of circling back to the one from whom all things do come and to whom all things return. Is that return just about the same old, same old, the dreary rut of our usual patterns and our usual complaints, our sins and follies? Or is it about the possibility of a new and deeper understanding of who we are in the sight of the God who turns to us? This Sunday looks back and looks ahead only because it grounds us in the eternal abiding of God with us. Jesus turned to the disciples, to us. God turns us. The two movements are more than complementary; they are two movements in one. God’s turning to us is our turning to him.
