by CCW | 15 December 2023 11:00
“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is the Advent refrain for the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We wait upon the motions of God’s word coming to us but that waiting is about our active attention to God’s constant and eternal presence. His coming is really about our coming into a deeper understanding and meaning of our lives with the God who is always at hand, always near, and always with us. As we heard last Sunday in the thundering words of Luke’s apocalyptic gospel, “look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.” And on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, we will hear Paul’s words that “the Lord is at hand” even as that day will bring us to Christmas Eve and to the celebration of Christ’s holy nativity.
The kingdom of heaven, the Lord, your redemption. What does it mean to speak about these things that are “at hand,” that are “nigh”, or near us? Our Advent meditation tonight will focus on something of their meaning by way of Mark Frank, a seventeenth century Anglican preacher and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (1613-1664), in ways which, I hope, will deepen our understanding of the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. It is really all about his eternal being and presence into which we come.
He notes that the Lord is said to be at hand or near us in several ways. First and foremost, “he is at hand, or near us, by his Divine essence,” by virtue of being God. For God, as the traditions of mystical theology and philosophy suggest, is “like a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As Mark Frank says, “He is everywhere; we therefore nowhere, but that he is near us,” drawing upon Paul’s observation that God is “not far from every one of us” since we have no being, no life apart from him. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17. 27,28).
This highlights the primacy of God with respect to all our thinking and being and recalls us to the mystery which embraces our very being. The mystical traditions of thought are all about a constant redire ad principia, a return to God as the principle of reality, a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God, as Lancelot Andrewes teaches. That mystery underlies all of the different forms of the kingdom of heaven, the Lord, and your redemption being at hand or nigh to us.
Secondly, Mark Frank suggests that the Lord is near us “by his humanity.” His humanity is nothing less than his taking upon himself what belongs to us. Christ is “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh,” like us in all respects save sin, the sin which undoes us. This speaks to the Christian mystery of the Incarnation which celebrates the union of the divine nature and human nature in the one person of Jesus Christ. Such things belong to the Chalcedonian Definition of the distinction and unity of the divine and human natures of Christ. It is through the Incarnation revealed to us in the whole pageant of the story of Christ that we learn about God and ourselves. As Donne aptly puts it, “his Christmas Day and his Easter Day are but the morning and evening of one and the same day,” emphasizing how God is made known to us through the whole story.
Thirdly, Mark Frank says, “he is nearer us yet by his grace: one with us, and we with him; one Spirit, too, he in us and we in him.” Grace is what comes from God to us, grace understood in a number of different registers such as in justification, sanctification, and glorification, all of which belong to the interplay and dynamic of the unity of the human and the divine in the person of Jesus Christ understood through the logic of the Chalcedonian Definition which upholds the full and true divinity and the full and true humanity of Christ without collapsing the one into the other. So, too, the understanding of grace according to that same logic for grace does not destroy but perfects nature.
Fourthly, “he is at hand and nigh us in our prayers, “ referencing the Psalmist. “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth” or faithfully (Ps. 145. 18). Fifthly, “he is nigh us in his word, in our mouths, and in our hearts, by the word of faith that is preached to us,” adding that “we need not up to heaven, nor down to the deep, says the Apostle, to find out Christ.” Why? Because “that eternal Word is nigh enough to us in his word.” Such is the radical meaning of the reading and preaching of God’s Word by which God is nigh unto us. The Scriptures as we heard last Sunday “were written for our learning.”
The sixth way in which the Lord is nigh unto us is “in the sacraments; so near in baptism as to touch and wash us: especially so near in the blessed sacrament of hs body and blood as to be almost touched by us. There he is truly, really, miraculously present with us and united to us,” expressing a clear and strong sense of the real presence of Christ in the sacraments. As he suggests, “it is want of eyes if we discern not his body, there in that, or see not his power in the other.” Faith our outward sense befriending makes the inward vision clear, as Aquinas puts it. The sacraments themselves belong to that interplay and intimacy of the human and the divine in Christ. They are “the outward and visible sign[s] of an inward and spiritual grace.”
The seventh way he is at hand is with his judgements. The coming of the Lord draweth nigh who is even at the door, always coming and always present. He comes in judgement in human history and human lives but there is his last coming at the general judgement. Mark Frank expands on the theme of judgement to introduce a third kind of judgement: “his being always ready at hand to deliver his faithful servants out of their troubles, and to revenge them in due time of all those that causelessly rise up against them;” thus judgement is seen as part and parcel of God’s providential care that reveals the justitia dei, the justice and mercy of God.
And in these several comings is our comfort that belongs to the pageant of the coming of Christ Jesus into the world and in the meaning of the Advent. The Third Sunday in Advent will show the meaning of that coming in words which are highlighted in the beautiful bidding prayer for the Advent Service of Lessons and Carols. “Go and show John again,” Jesus will say to John’s disciples, “those things which 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,” a wonderful collocation of images that belong to the vision of our wholeness and completeness in redemption. “And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”
All these things testify to the one who comes and to the comfort which his coming brings for these are the “pure, and holy, and comfortable doctrines that he taught,” Mark Frank says, that “were a sufficient resolution to S. John Baptist’s question” the question that will resound in our ears this Sunday. “Art thou he should come or do we look for another?” But this is “he that should come” and we should “look for no other, no other than he,” and as understood in these several ways of his coming and being with us.
As he puts it in a Christmas sermon, “this Jesus is a Jesus of another sort” what he calls “a Jehovah Jesus, a Saviour that is the Lord, as the Angel tells us. A Jesus, never the like before” referencing the Joshua or Jesus and other figures with a similar name. For this Jesus is “a Jesus above every Jesus, a name now above every name , a name to which heaven and earth and hell must bow: never did they to any Jesus else.”
This brings us back to the ways in which the Lord is nigh and to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming. His “coming is above every coming. We sometimes call our own births … a coming in the world; but properly, none ever came into the world but he.” This is difficult but profoundly insightful. He explains: “For he only truly can be said to come, who is before he comes: so were not we; only he so.” Our coming is our becoming, our being created, our coming into existence. He always was, always was the Incarnate Son. As Cyril of Alexandria says, “One is the Son, One Lord, Jesus Christ both before the incarnation and after the incarnation.”
About Jesus’s coming in his holy birth, Mark Frank says “he only strictly comes who comes willingly; our crying and struggling at our entrance into the world shows how unwillingly we come into it. He alone it is that sings out, ‘Lo, I come.’” The idea here is that God’s coming to us implies his coming from somewhere. “He only properly comes, who comes from some place or other. Alas! We had none to come from but the womb of nothing. He only had a place to be in before he came. Now, such a Jesus as this – as has God in his name, and must be conceived to be also so by the way of his coming – may well be the Messiah ‘that should come into the world,’ Jesus the Christ.” We do not need to seek or look for another.
His coming gathers together the many and several ways in which the kingdom of heaven is at hand, the Lord is nigh and your redemption draweth nigh. Such is his Advent and so may we rejoice and be glad in it.
Fr. David Curry
Advent Programme 2, 2023
Christ Church (service cxl owing to the cold)
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