Author: CCW

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”

Today’s Gospel is unique among the churches of Christendom historically speaking and in two ways. First, it was the English Church alone, early in that long period which we rather ambiguously and perhaps mistakenly call the Middle Ages, that chose this Gospel reading for Advent Sunday, and secondly, it was Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Prayer Book, who in the 16th century extended the reading to include the story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem. Both features offer a profound insight into the meaning of Advent at once as the season of expectancy and waiting and as the doctrine of the Advent in the constant coming of God towards us in judgement and mercy, in humility and power, in truth and love, through the pageant of Revelation in the ordered life of the Church.

Advent is the motion of God’s Word coming to us now and always. That coming is threefold: the coming of God in carne, in the flesh of Christ’s holy Incarnation, the coming of God in judicio, in judgement and truth, and the coming of God in mente, in heart and mind. Advent is really about our constant waiting upon those motions of God coming towards us that awakens in us a sense of expectancy and preparation. In a way, the whole of our lives is about our waiting upon those motions of God coming towards us which is the real truth and meaning of human redemption. That is found precisely in the motions of God’s love towards us in Word and Sacrament, in judgement, and in humility and mercy, in grace and love, all conveyed through the Scriptures.

Paul in Romans highlights two things: first, that law is love, and secondly, that in the coming of God as light in the darkness of human sin and evil, we are bidden to walk in that light, “put[ting] on the armour of light” which is nothing less than “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Such is the meaning of “cast[ing] off the works of darkness and put[ting] on the armour of light” concentrated in the Collect that is to be prayed not just on this Sunday and week but throughout the Advent Season.

Christ comes “in great humility,” as the Gospel images from Zechariah the prophet make clear. His triumphal entrance into Jerusalem – the pageant of Palm Sunday – is not in pomp and circumstance but in “meek[ness] and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.” This challenges all our worldly expectations of glory and majesty. We see at once the wonder and joy of the multitude who welcome him with cries of “Hosanna to the Son of David,” cries that convey the sense of majesty even as we know only too well how those cries of rejoicing will be turned to cries of “Crucify. Crucify.” Such is our darkness, to be sure, the darkness of sin and ignorance. Something of both those aspects of fallen humanity is present in the bewilderment of the crowd, for “when he was come into Jerusalem all the city was moved, saying, Who is this?”

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“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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