by CCW | 17 December 2023 10:00
The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on the last two Sundays of Advent. They begin today with John’s great question to Jesus: “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” That, in turn, leads to the rhetorical questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asks, with triple intensity. “What went ye out for to see?” “But what went ye out for to see?” In a wonderful paradox, Jesus’ questions to us point us to John who in turn points us to Jesus. Likewise, next Sunday the questions about John the Baptist by the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem” lead to John the Baptist’s proclamation in “Bethany beyond Jordan” about Jesus as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
What are these advent questions really about? They awaken us to the redemption of our desires by placing our desires, what I am tempted to call the ‘bad infinity of our desires’ (schlechte unendlichkeit – with apologies to Hegel), with God in Christ . Such is the redemption of our desires. Our desires belong to prayer in the sense of longing but our longing itself is essentially tragic because it is a longing for what we do not have and cannot attain. It is a desire for this thing and that thing in an effort to find the truth of our desires which is always beyond us. Dante captures this sense of the endless restlessness of desire in the Convivio:
the infant intensely longing for an apple; and then, later on, for a little bird; and then, still further on, fine clothes; and then a horse; and then a mistress; then modest riches; then more; and then still more. And that is because in none of these things does it find that for which it ever seeks, and it believes to find it further on.
It belongs to human desire, as he puts it, to be always reaching out in one way or another. “And the reason is this: the deepest desire of each thing, arising from its very nature, is to return to its principle. And because God is the principle of our soul, and has made it like himself (as it is written, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’), the soul mightily desires to return to him;” in short, to God. Prayer, as George Herbert wonderfully says, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” essentially encapsulating the same understanding.
All this is profoundly beautiful and true and yet it is both forgotten and denied in our contemporary world. Radically incomplete and reductive forms of thinking such as psychology, economics, and the social sciences, collectively captured in the term ‘sociologism’, displace theology and philosophy as the primary forms of thought. We have lost a sense of God and our humanity in their intrinsic and necessary interrelation. This leads to the reduction of all authority to “mere power detached from any intrinsic ordination to truth and goodness”. As the Italian philosopher and statesman, Augusto Del Noce observes, sociologism effectively “reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures or forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life”. Reducing all conceptions of the world to a kind of ‘social constructivism’ not only negates the transcendence of God and the givenness of creation but also itself since all human and social constructions depend upon principles prior to themselves. It is as if we are gods, making the world and God in our own image.
This is really the wilderness of modernity. The wilderness is within, not primarily without, as Isaiah makes so clear. “Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his vineyard … My beloved had a vineyard … and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” The passage imagines God’s perplexity and disappointment about what is really our human perversity. “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?”
The wilderness is the wildness within us that results in a loss of unity and harmony through our separation from God and the truth of creation as grounded in the Creator. “The vineyard,” Isaiah goes on to say, “is the house of Israel” but as symbolic of creation itself in its turning away from its truth in God.
The great questions of Advent seek the redemption of human desires. This is wonderfully seen in today’s Gospel which complements the Epistle reading from 1st Corinthians. Along with the Collect, it reminds us of the purpose and nature of the ministry of the Church to prepare us for the coming of God in us. We wait in the wilderness upon the motions of God’s coming to us. The radical nature of that coming is about the eternal presence of God with us now and always, on the one hand, and the awakening in our souls about its meaning and truth for ourselves as known and loved in God, on the other hand. That is entirely about the pilgrimage of our souls to God and with God in God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ. In him is the redemption of our desires. We seek completeness and wholeness which can only be found in the truth of God, the truth in which and by which we might begin to understand the truth of all things.
This is Jesus’ answer to John’s question. He declares himself to be the very truth that we seek. “Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and see,” he says to the disciples of John. And what are those things? “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.” And if that were not enough, he adds “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” The Gospel offers a poignant and profound image of our wholeness and completeness as found in God.
It means “turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,” as the Collect says. That turning is a fundamental feature of the doctrine of the Advent. God turns to us and turns us to himself. We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves about what we most desire. Yet our desires find their redemption in Christ. His questions to us highlight the true nature of our waiting in the wilderness. “What went ye out for to see?” It is an active looking and attending to the eternal motions of God coming to us. Far from the negation of our desires, Advent signals the redemption of our desires.
How? By questioning us about what we think we seek and desire. In so doing we confront the limitations and failings of our longings and are awakened to their true nature and their true end. As Augustine famously says in an all too familiar quote: “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” But why? Because of what we have forgotten that equally belongs to that passage from his Confessions. We often overlook the reason and the meaning of that restlessness. It is because God has made us for himself: quia fecisti nos ad te.
Desire is the substance of prayer itself, “the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage,” as George Herbert puts it. This shows how the redemption of desire belongs to what it means to be human. The questions of Advent awaken us to the true meaning and fulfillment of our desires, not for what is to happen but our waiting upon what has happened and which belongs to the eternity of God in our midst. We can look for no other.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 3, 2023
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