Day: November 23, 2025

“Then Jesus turned”

In the senescence of the year comes Christ the King, striding across the barren fields of our humanity to gather us into his everlasting love (with apologies to T.S. Eliot). What is that coming? It is his Advent, his coming to us as beginning and end and so this Sunday with its wonderful collocation of prepositions – next and before – marks an ending and a beginning, a time of transition which concentrates for us the deeper theological meaning of Christ’s Advent. It is now and always.

T.S. Eliot captures something of this in his poem East Coker of the Four Quartets. It begins with “in my beginning is my end” and ends with “in my end is my beginning.” Such is a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God in the Advent of Christ.

There is the gathering together of all of the scattered and broken pieces of our lives to their wholeness and end in Christ and there is our beginning again to embark upon the pageant of Christ’s Advent towards us in Word and in flesh, in judgement and mercy, in grace and glory, that accomplishes the redemption of humanity. The challenge for us is to enter once into the radical meaning of God coming and being with us.

For centuries upon centuries, the Gospel for this Sunday, which was always the Sunday Next Before Advent regardless of the number of Sundays that preceded it, was John’s account of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, a reading also used on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. There the emphasis was on the theme of refreshment and of God’s Providence in providing for our humanity in the pilgrimage journey of our lives. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.” What was gathered up were twelve baskets filled with the fragments from the wilderness banquet, a basket for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, on the one hand, and for each of the Apostles of the Apostolic Church, on the other hand. But here, read on this Sunday, it marks the greater theme of the gathering of all things to their unity and truth in God; in short, the end and purpose of our humanity as found in God, “that nothing be lost.”

That theme of the gathering in the wilderness complements the equally ancient reading from Jeremiah which looks back to the Exodus journey where the Lord through Moses brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt and to the Davidic kingship in which the tribes of Israel were united but both moments now seen by Jeremiah in the impending Babylonian captivity as the hope and promise of the return of Israel. Yet in the Christian understanding, “rais[ing] unto David a righteous Branch” echoes Isaiah’s prophecy about the Messiah, an allusion or prophecy about Christ, “the Lord our Righteousness”; in short, a judgement and restoration theme.

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