Day: December 22, 2024

“I am not the Christ”

The season and doctrine of Advent reaches a crescendo of intensity and expectation on the Fourth Sunday in Advent and illumines already for us the radical meaning of the Advent of God coming to us in Christ. It does so by the dance of negation and affirmation at once about ourselves and about God.

The Epistle reading from Philippians is at once an affirmation of what comes to us: “the Lord is at hand;” but it is also a negation of our anxieties and fears and worries as we scuttle around busily trying to do more with less in our preparations for Christmas. “In nothing be anxious,” Paul bids us, calling us to moderation or temperance in a time of excess and to prayer with thanksgiving “in everything,” highlighting the radical meaning of Christ’s coming as “the peace of God which passeth all understanding,” for it is not and cannot be of our making, nor is it about what is coming so much as it is about what has already happened and which is the absolute cause and reason of our rejoicing, regardless of the circumstances and events in our world of darkness and despair, of the distress of nations and the sorrows of so many broken hearts. Here is the peace and the healing of God: “Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say, rejoice.” The Advent of God to us is the Lord himself; Christ Jesus is Saviour. That and that alone is the counter to our fears and anxieties. It is the greater affirmation that overthrows the empty nothingness of our hearts and world. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

The Gospel makes this wonderfully clear in the dance of negation and affirmation in terms of the figure of John the Baptist. We don’t pay enough attention to this Gospel known as the witness of John. Yet it heightens the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas, transforming the emotions and sentiments of this time of year into a deeper understanding. “The Jews,” John the Evangelist, the theologian par excellence as the early Church recognized and which we forget, tells us “sent Priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?” It is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jerusalem is mentioned, alerting us already to the trajectory of Christian contemplation around the two centers of Bethlehem and Jerusalem in a kind of ellipse. There is, it seems, a questioning, a seeking among the world of Israel, that focuses here on the strange and compelling figure of John the Baptist. It is as if they have a sense of something important and impending that sends them out of the city and into the wilderness in a kind of holy questioning.

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