by CCW | 22 December 2024 10:00
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.
What follows are three strong negations of himself. “He confessed and denied not; and confessed, I am not the Christ.” And not Elijah: “I am not.” And not the Prophet, “No. Three negatives. But the Priests and Levites persist in their questioning, then “Who art thou?” This leads to John’s affirmation not simply of himself but of his vocation, the very meaning of his being and purpose. This is not the same thing as our contemporary claims to identity which is about the confusions and illusions of self through ourselves alone. John makes clear that he is vox clamantis in deserto, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah.”
It is the fuller affirmation of what we heard from Jesus himself last Sunday. An affirmation of the vocation and witness of John. It is not about himself but about the radical meaning of the one who comes whose baptism, it is implied, is greater than John’s preaching of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. John emphatically points us not to himself but to Jesus as the one who “stands among you whom you know not but who comes after me,” and whom earlier, he identifies as “he who was before me.”
All of this points to the dance of apophatic and kataphatic theology, the dialectical dance of the understanding which at once negates and affirms the relation of God to us and with us. God is always more and thus the comparisons or analogies of God to us are always less than adequate. They serve to raise our thoughts and feelings upward into the mystery of God. But the most radical affirmation of John’s witness to Christ comes in the last words of this astounding passage, and in words which capture the deeper and transcendent mystery of the Advent. “John sees Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” God comes as Saviour; in short, as sacrifice. This is the deeper and more radical meaning of Advent.
This is wonderfully encapsulated in the Collect which seeks for God to “raise up” his “power and come among us”; in other words, raise us up into the mystery of God himself. This is the succour or help that we seek whether knowingly or not in all of our fears and anxieties. What is wanted is that we should be aware that “through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race before us.” It will only be by God’s “bountiful grace and mercy” that we may be delivered and raised up into the life of the Trinity.
All of this is the intensity that belongs to the expectancy of Advent. It is our waiting and watching upon God. That is the radical meaning of our lives. We wait and watch upon God, the source and end of all our being and life. John the Baptist’s vocation is to point us to Jesus as Lord and Saviour just as Mary’s vocation is to keep us with him “according to his word;” he in us and we in him. “I am not the Christ,” John the Baptist says even as he points us to the Christ in whom we too are both Christ’s and Christ ourselves in a radical sense. “Another liveth in me.” For such is the wonder and mystery of Advent. In the darkest days of nature’s year, there is the coming of the one in whom is life and “the life was the light of our humanity,” now and always. “The way up and the way down are one and the same,” as Heraclitus puts it, for such is the dance of negation and affirmation at once about ourselves and about the greater mystery of God in his Advent to us. Christ comes to redeem us from ourselves only to find ourselves in him.
Fr. David Curry
Advent 4, 2024
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2024/12/22/sermon-for-the-fourth-sunday-in-advent-15/
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