Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 3
“Art thou he that should come?”
“How shall this be?” Mary asks the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Advent, too, is all annunciation, we might say. “Art thou he that should come?” John the Baptist in prison asks Jesus by way of two of his disciples. Jesus in turn asks the multitudes with repeated intensity about John the Baptist, “what went ye out for to see?” The questions of Advent call us to account because they call us into the presence of God at once always present and yet always coming to us. The question the city asks in the Gospel for Advent 1, namely, “Who is this?”, is really the question about ’who is God?’ and ‘who is God with us?’
At issue is our awareness of God, the divine light enlightening the darkness of our minds again and again in the ways of our coming to God. The questions illuminate an important feature of our humanity. They signal the desire to know, the eros, the passionate desire to know, as Plato teaches. We are created to know ‘each in accord with the capacity of the beholder to behold’. Man desires and delights to praise God, Augustine teaches (“laudare te vult homo… ut laudare te delectet”). It belongs to our nature to know, Aristotle says. That in turn presupposes that there is something to be learned, something to be known. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our hearts are restless – inquietum – until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine, Confessions 1.1).
This goes a long way towards countering several different modern dilemmas about whether education is in any way possible. The question that John the Baptist has his disciples ask Jesus informs the wonderful and beautiful Matin Responsory of Palestrina, sometimes sung at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, quoting the Gospel directly, “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”
The great readings of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols are all prefaced by introductory phrases that give the service a clearly Christian context and meaning. The two readings from Genesis, the three readings from Isaiah, and the reading from Micah all locate certain themes in terms of their fulfillment in Christ signalled in the readings from Luke, Matthew, and John. The whole sequence forms a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the radical meaning of redemption in the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration, as it were, but all through a kind of meditation on the meaning of God with us, Emmanuel. But that idea of the Word made flesh coming to us through the pageant of the Word written and proclaimed belongs to a larger consideration about the nature of education and about our lives in faith. In other words, though the service is explicitly Christian, it is not exclusively so since it touches upon the logos-centric nature of God as Word, as intellectual-principle, as it were, summed up in the 9th Lesson from John’s Prologue, itself the great Gospel of Christmas.
Augustine famously notes that he knew already about the Word that “was in the beginning”, that “was God”and that “was with God” from the libri Platonici, the books of the Platonists, at once looking back to Plato and to his various heirs in the forms of the Neoplatonisms in his own time. That is pretty powerful because it brings out the inescapably philosophical qualities of Advent. It is all about being taught.
The idea of something coming to us and awakening in us a kind of holy wonder means that we are not complete in ourselves. Thus the pageant of Advent in all of its richness is about light coming into the darkness of our world and our minds. The pageant of Advent challenges the dominant myths of our contemporary world within and without our churches. It explicitly counters the idea of the autonomous self, the abstract individual in the delusions of his/her/its own completeness. Nothing could be more delusionary. Nothing could be more counter to experience. The whole possibility of education, of learning, depends on the realization of our own ignorance and incompleteness. To grasp that is to begin to embark upon the pilgrimage of learning. Advent signals that beginning and its possibility in the coming of God as Word and Light.
John the Baptist and Mary are the two outstanding figures in the landscape of Advent. They complement each other and reveal to us the necessary forms of our response and attitude to God’s Word coming to us. They open us out to the radical nature of God as truth. Jesus says to John’s disciples, “go and show John again what things ye do hear and see: 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”. These words are explicitly invoked in the great Bidding Prayer of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. They signal the nature of human redemption: our wholeness as found not in ourselves in the endless parade of our follies and sins but in God through the pageant of his Word constantly coming to us.
What else is the ministry about, Paul suggests in the Epistle from 1st Corinthians, except to be faithful to what God has revealed to reason, the God who brings to light “the hidden things of darkness” in the world and in our hearts; for only then “shall every man have praise of God”. The confession of sin is equally the confession of the praise of God, as Augustine shows. Such, too, is the teaching of John the Baptist. But we are also to be like Mary whose question leads to her defining statement: “Be it unto me according to thy word”. As her questioning suggests, this is not blind, unthinking obedience. It is about a complete attention to the coming of God’s Word as truth, a complete and willing surrender of oneself to what is greater than oneself. It is about our openness to God, the God who takes the things of the world in all of their folly and uses them to make himself known to us. Only so are we recalled to who we are in the sight of God, not autonomous selves in the delusions of our self-importance, but the children of God who seek the truth which is most to be sought.
It happens through the questions of John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Be it unto me according to thy word” is the answer to our restless, anxious and fearful hearts. We come to that realization through the witness and hardships of John the Baptist. He voices the great Advent cry, our yearning for what is greater than ourselves.
“Art thou he that should come?”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2020