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.
The atheisms of our age and church assume that we make God in our own image. God then is nothing more than the projection of our own flawed and failed dreams and fantasies. The biblical and philosophical vision on the Sunday Next Before Advent provides a counter and a corrective view. God turns to us without which we cannot turn to him. It argues for a greater degree of reciprocity and freedom, a greater degree of communion and fellowship but only through a necessary corrective of our arrogance and ignorance. We can only turn and be turned if there is something to be turned to. The self is nothing in itself; it is nothing without God. God, self, and other are intertwined and inseparably bound up in the mystery of God.
The architecture of Christ Church speaks to this spiritual reality. Look up and behold the very beams of the Church. They are Alpha and Omega beams. The terms mark the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. They literally hold up the roof and building of the Church but more importantly they signal the purpose and meaning of what the building exists for: Christ is our Alpha and Omega, our beginning and our end.
To be returned to our beginning is the blessing of this day which stands at the end of one year of grace and at the start of another. All that we can hope and pray for is a renewal of our minds and souls in the grace of Christ. It is about our being turned again and again to the God who has turned to us and whose turning is the counter and corrective to all our sins and failings. His turning is the hope of our turning again. It signals hope and joy in the face of a world of despair and sadness, all the fears and worries about the recurring ebb and flow of Covid-19 notwithstanding.
What follows from Jesus’ turning is his first direct speech to us in John’s Gospel. Significantly, the first direct speech of Jesus is a question: “what seek ye?” The question speaks to the desire of our hearts, to a sense of spiritual yearning, to a looking for something greater than ourselves. In other words, it speaks to character, to the story of our lives as lived for a purpose that is greater than ourselves. This is ancient wisdom and truth about what it means to be human. The disciples of John follow after Jesus whom John identifies as “the Lamb of God.” When Jesus asks them “what do you seek?”, they respond with a question which is equally significant. There is a kind of reciprocity between God and our humanity in the interrogative exchange. “Rabbi (which is, being interpreted, Master), where dwellest thou?”
This speaks to the spiritual insight that we are made for God. We abide only in the truth and wisdom and love of God. The recurring refrain of the Trinity season is that “God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him”. That can only happen through the twofold turning and the awakening to truth that this Gospel scene presents. Though this is not the ancient and classical Gospel reading for this day which was about the gathering up of the fragments from the feeding in the wilderness in John’s account, it nonetheless points us to the radical meaning of our turning to the one in whom we have our abiding. What follows is the simple statement of Jesus, “come and see.” The invitation highlights the nature of Christian discipleship. It is about following and being with and constantly learning from the Messiah, the one whom Advent will name as Emmanuel, God with us.
The Gospel reading ends with the statement of Philip to Nathaniel that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” This locates the story and the meaning of Christ as the Messiah within the pageant of the Hebrew Scriptures and thus complements the lesson from Jeremiah about the hope of Israel realized in “The Lord our Righteousness.” The phrase is in capital letters. The oldest manuscripts were all in capitals, majuscules, but in the later editions only certain phrases like this one were kept in that form. It is a matter of doctrinal and spiritual emphasis emphasis about God – the term Lord is used for the name of God as I am who I am. The salvation of Judah and Israel, and through the vocation of Israel to the whole of our humanity, is about God gathering our humanity back to himself. The prophet Jeremiah references both the Exodus and the Exile: The Lord bringing the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; the Lord leading the seed of the house of Israel out of the Babylonian captivity. The passage speaks about a kind of home-coming, a return to their own land. The Christian reworking of this theme of return and salvation is seen in the Gospel reading in Jesus’ turning, his questioning, and his invitation. “Come and see,” he says. It marks the turning point to a renewed beginning again in him who is our end, our joy and our good.
This sense of interplay and complementarity between God and Man, between endings and beginnings, belongs to a larger tradition of spiritual reflection on God as Word expressed for instance in Psalm 119. I commend that Psalm to you for your Advent preparations. Just as Jesus is Alpha and Omega in the Christian understanding, referencing the first and last letter of the Greek alphabet, so too Psalm 119 references all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The psalm consists of twenty-two stanzas, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order begins each stanza. Each stanza consists of eight lines. In every verse – there are 176 verses- there is an explicit reference to God in terms of the Law by way of different synonyms, rendered in the English translations as word, testimonies, judgements, precepts, statutes, commandments, or law. The entire psalm is an intense meditation on God as Word or Law. Central to the Jewish understanding, it shapes and informs Christian thought and reflection as well. God’s turning to us in his word and law is our delight and freedom. It is about our learning what it means to abide with God in his truth, in his word constantly coming to us. Advent awakens us once again to God’s coming to us in word and judgement. That turning is our joy. Come and see.
“Then Jesus turned”
Fr. David Curry
The Sunday Next Before Advent
November 22nd, 2020