“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.
I love the juxtaposition of the repentance ministry of John the Baptist with the theme of rejoicing visibly signalled in the rose coloured candle on the Advent wreath. It reminds us of the role of Mary in the economy of salvation. John the Baptist and Mary are the two outstanding figures in the landscape of Advent. It is not by accident that the Advent Ember Day Gospel read later this week is the story of the Annunciation; it is the beginning of the story of Mary’s great ‘yes’ to God that belongs inescapably and essentially to the radical meaning of the Incarnation. Both John the Baptist and Mary remind us of the forms of our participation in the Advent of God; the one calling us to repentance, a repentance that finds its fulfillment ultimately in Mary’s fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word,” she will say, and thus, it is our rejoicing.
The Advent emphasizes the Angelic announcement to her: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee.” As Luke tells us, Mary “was troubled at this saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.” Her inner questioning is an essential feature of the Christian faith. It will lead to her explicit question, “How shall this be seeing I know not a man?” Her questioning is not her doubting but her desiring to know. The result will be her complete and active acquiescence to the Word and Will of God as the chosen vessel who completely defines herself by what God seeks for us through her. The Advent Ember Gospel highlights the wonder of the mystery of the one who will be with her and whom “she shall conceive in her womb” without the aid of a man. “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest.” His reign and kingdom are from everlasting. This challenges all our assumptions about what it means to be human. In the Christian understanding, that can only be found in Christ and Christ in us.
Mary signals the essential character of our Faith. The Church is precisely Marian in this sense of willing what God makes known to us in his Word and Son. But the way to that is through another activity required in us, namely, repentance. What is that except our awareness of the sin and darkness that separates us from the truth of God in whom we find the truth of our humanity? It is not found in ourselves in the disorder of our desires and in the confusion of our hearts and minds. Christ coming in the flesh of our humanity is our redemption and restoration to the truth of ourselves as found in God.
It is not, as our contemporary culture assumes, the affirmation of ourselves in our existential claims to self-identity. For that is to reduce God to us rather than to raise us to God. Such is our narcissism and our nihilism. As G.K. Chesterton wryly observed, “it is profoundly true to say that the glad good news brought by the Gospel was the news of original sin.” This is the awareness of the gap or gulf between ourselves and God, a gulf which we cannot ourselves bridge or overcome. John’s ministry of “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” points to Jesus as that forgiveness and hence the restoration of our humanity. We are made for God, not God for us.
John is in prison because he spoke truth to power, telling Herod that he was wrong to take his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias, for his own wife. This excited the wrath of Herod who had him imprisoned but was reluctant to have him executed owing to his reputation. Her daughter, Salome, dancing before him, pleased Herod so much so that he promised her whatever she wished. Her mother, Herodias, told her to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, to which request Herod acquiesced, and had him beheaded. Just as John the Baptist’s remarkable birth to Zechariah and Elizabeth, beyond the age of child-bearing – echoes of the birth of Isaac, the promised son to aged Sarah and Abraham – points us to the greater miracle of Jesus’ conception and birth from the Virgin Mary, so too his violent death prepares and points the way to Christ’s Passion and Death on the Cross.
Such is the ministry of John the Baptist which Jesus highlights for us this morning. Who and what do we seek? Jesus states clearly the Gospel of our human redemption. It is about our healing and restoration as found in himself. Jesus tells John’s disciples: “Go and show John again 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.” He adds in a specific reference both to John and himself: “And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.”
This concentrates the whole matter of repentance. We are those who take offence at God in his goodness when we demand that God be accountable to us and subject to the categories of radical indeterminacy about ourselves. We lose sight of the truth of our being as made in the image of God which we have betrayed. Repentance is simply our turning back to him from whom in sin we have turned away. To seek that turning is our awareness of the need for grace. Jesus emphasizes the radical truth of John’s ministry with his threefold question to the multitude in the wilderness, “What went ye out for to see?” He points us to John the Baptist who points us to Jesus as the one who should come. There is no other. John and Mary belong together in the wonder of Advent. Repentance and rejoicing go together. Our watching and waiting is our repentance and our rejoicing. Repentance is our turning because we are being turned to God. “Turn us again, O God; show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.”
And such is the radical purpose and meaning of the Church’s ministry. It recalls us to God and to his life in us. As John the Evangelist says in the great Prologue of his Gospel about John the Baptist: “he was not that light but was sent to bear witness to that light.” John Donne, preaching on this text three times, first at Christmas in 1621 and twice again in 1622, notes that “the lights of faith, and of nature are subordinate John the Baptists.” So, too, with the ministry of the Church. We are tasked with the ministry of John in calling all of us to repentance without which there can be no rejoicing. The question of John the Baptist from prison leads to the truth of John’s whole ministry in life and in death. It is found in what we “hear and see” and to our being like Mary in willing what we hear and see. It is found in the one who comes. There can be no other.
“Art thou he that should come?”
Fr. David Curry,
Advent 3, 2024