Day: December 15, 2024

“Art thou he that should come?”

The voice of one crying in the wilderness cries out from the wilderness of prison. It is the voice of John the Baptist, identified in the Gospel and the Collect as the messenger sent by God to prepare the way of Christ before him. He is, as Jesus says, a prophet and yet more than a prophet. His ministry signals the nature of the ministry of the Christian Church as belonging to the Advent of God and to the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. The ministry, too, belongs to the doctrine and the season of Advent.

What is that ministry? The task and vocation of “the ministers and stewards of the mysteries of Christ” is to prepare and make ready his way in us. How? By “turn[ing] the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.” And that is exactly why John is in prison. Both Matthew and Mark give us the fuller story elsewhere in their Gospels about why John in prison sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus the great Advent question, “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” “Who is this?” all the city of Jerusalem asked as we heard on the first Sunday in Advent in the Gospel reading inserted into our Canadian Prayer Book. The questions of Advent belong to the doctrine of Advent. It is about nothing less and nothing more than our awakening and being opened to what comes from God to us.

Advent is our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s love coming to us in a variety of registers: there is God’s Word coming in Law and Prophecy, in judgement and mercy, in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh. It is all about what comes from God to us, on the one hand, and our being awakened to its meaning, on the other hand. What is that awakening in us? It is the awareness of our need for something more than ourselves, our awareness of the sin and darkness in us that stands in the way of the good which we rightly seek but do not have of ourselves. This is all part and parcel of what will be known as “the witness of John” whose ministry is essential to the life and mission of the Church as nothing less and nothing more than the body of Christ and to the possibilities of his life in us. Repentance and rejoicing go together on this day, sometimes known as Gaudete Sunday. The term, “rejoice,” refers to the ancient introit of the Mass taken from Philippians which is the Epistle reading for next Sunday.

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