by CCW | 11 December 2022 10:00
The questioning of John the Baptist about Jesus as the Messiah is complemented by Mary’s questioning about the Annunciation to her which is about Christ’s conception. “The Lord is with thee” the Angel Gabriel said. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” John asks in prison, sending two of his disciples to Jesus. Mary, as we will hear in this week’s Advent Ember Days, “was troubled at the Angel’s saying” wondering “what manner of salutation this should be”. It leads to her question recalled in the great pageant of Advent Lessons and Carols, “how shall this be seeing I know not a man?”
These questions highlight Advent as the season of questions opening us out to the kingdom of God and reminding us of the darkness of doubt and uncertainty. John the Baptist and Mary are the outstanding figures of the landscape of Advent. Their questions point us to the radical meaning of the coming of God’s Word in judgment and hope, in grace and salvation, in Word and Sacrament, and, ultimately, as the Word made flesh. That coming is at once in the body and in the mind. Holding the intellectual and the sensible together in creative tension is the meaning of faith: “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). By way of John the Baptist and Mary we learn about the nature of our spiritual lives in faith. It is very much fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. And that requires repentance and rejoicing. Such is the witness of John the Baptist and Mary.
And such are the spiritual principles that define our souls in the pageant of Advent. “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel”, the refrain of the Veni Emmanuel exults, echoing the Introit Psalm for this Sunday, “Rejoice in the Lord”. But how? Through Mary. Only so is Christ “Emmanuel”, God with us who comes in the very substance of our humanity as the Word made flesh. Yet only so through Mary’s ‘yes’ to God, her strong affirmation of what defines faith: “Be it unto me according to thy word”. Mary’s Magnificat belongs to the high note of rejoicing on this Sunday known traditionally as Gaudate Sunday, one of the Latin words for rejoice. We repent with John the Baptist in looking towards and learning about the need for a Saviour. We rejoice with Mary in the mysteries of God’s coming to us. Both belong to the ministry of the Church in preparing and making ready God’s way to us and in us. How?
“By turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,” as the Collect beautifully puts it. Such is our darkness, a darkness of doubt and uncertainty leading to the greater darkness of disobedience which is nothing less than the story of the Fall endlessly repeated in our lives. At the heart of that disobedience is our pride and narcissistic self-absorption and obsession which always puts ourselves before God. The questions of John and Mary are the exact opposite. They signal a true and genuine desire to know and to will what is known. They open us out to the very pattern of our spiritual lives in the constant interplay of repentance and in rejoicing. They go together.
The dialectic of repentance and rejoicing has been neglected by the contemporary church. It is really a feature of penitential adoration which is a defining feature of Prayer Book spirituality. To repent is to rejoice in the goodness and love of God without which we cannot repent. Our repentance is our acknowledgement of what God seeks for us and reveals to us.
Thus John’s question leads to a wonderful and paradoxical scene where Jesus points to the meaning of the ministry of John the Baptist which is simply about pointing to Jesus as the Messiah. John is not just another prophet in a line of prophets but “more than a prophet” because he points to prophecy’s fulfillment in the meaning of Christ’s coming. Thus Jesus points us to himself as Emmanuel by way of pointing us to John the Baptist. But first by way of direct answer to John’s question. It is a powerful message.
“Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see”, Jesus says to John’s disciples. John had heard in prison about the works of Christ. He seeks an affirmation of those works and an understanding of their meaning. This shapes the great Advent Prayer in the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. What are those things which we 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.” There it is. A wonderful picture of our humanity as redeemed and restored to wholeness and completeness, a wholeness and completeness which we do not have in ourselves because of the darkness of our hearts and world.
To deny this is the greater darkness of our narcissistic age, imprisoned in our minds, disconnected from God and creation and from ourselves and from one another. Our disobedience is our self-absorption, incurvatus in se. It is the definition of sin. We are turned in upon ourselves as if reality were simply and completely mind-dependent. Such is the solipsism of our times; the illusions of the self in revolt against the givenness of things (including the self).
Yet Jesus reminds us of our yearning for something more than just the prison of ourselves. “What went ye out for to see?”, he asks us about John the Baptist. John’s ministry was about nothing more and nothing less than awakening us to our own darkness, the forms of our ignorance and disobedience, an awakening to a desire for what is right and true, to what is the cause of our rejoicing. John’s gospel of the baptism of repentance prepares us for the joy of Christ’s coming. “Rejoice in the Lord”, indeed, as the Introit Psalm bids us, for what we seek is that we should be turned to God. “Turn us again, O God;/ show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole”, as the Gradual Psalm proclaims. Our turning is our repentance. God in us in our repenting and God in us in our rejoicing. And so in the mid-point of Advent, the darkness itself offers light and grace, a Word of grace to John in prison about the Word of God who “yields himself to lie in prison, in thy deare womb” as John Donne puts it about the womb of Mary. Repent and rejoice. Rejoice and repent. Such are the spiritual notes of this day. They belong to our being made whole; in short, to our salvation in the One who comes with healing and joy.
Fr. David Curry
Advent III, 2022
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