Author: CCW

“All the city was moved saying, Who is this?”

It is the great question of the Advent season, itself the great season of questions. It complements another great question, itself a biblical question, too, “what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the Son of Man that thou visitest him?” These questions recall us to God’s great question to us, to Adam in the Garden after the Fall, “Where are you?” with the implied question, ‘and what have you done?’ Somehow the questions about God and man ultimately meet in questions about Jesus.

“Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This is the refrain or mantra, we might say, of the Advent season – the season of God’s coming to us. What does it mean that the kingdom of heaven is at hand? Jesus takes up this refrain from John the Baptist and makes it his own. In him it has its fullest meaning. But what is that meaning?

For centuries upon centuries upon centuries, the great gospel story for this day has been the triumphal entry of Christ into the holy city of Jerusalem. He comes as a king. His coming is greeted with eager enthusiasm and joyous expectation, it seems. He is hailed as king.

But is this not the gospel of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week leading to the dark pain and agony of Good Friday, the somber silence of Holy Saturday, and then, only then, the paradoxical and overwhelming joy of Easter? To be sure. But “Christmas and Easter are but the evening and the morning of one and the self-same day” as the poet and preacher John Donne puts it. There is an inescapable connection between these two primary centers of Christian contemplation. Like an ellipse, our faith oscillates between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, each are implicated in the other. Neither makes any sense without the other.

We know, of course, the further irony of this triumphal entry of a king to his city. The cries of “Hosanna” quickly turn to the cries of “Crucify, Crucify!” And only so can we really begin to learn what it means for the kingdom of heaven to be at hand. “My kingdom”, Jesus will say, “is not of this world”. But that is precisely what we so often want to make it. That is precisely our darkness which the Light of Christ coming to us overcomes.

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“Thy word is a lantern unto my feet, / and a light unto my path”

What is the Bible? It is a book, to be sure, even The Book, though it was not always a book exactly. Formerly, there were scrolls of parchment as the Bible itself shows us. Jesus, for example, takes up the scroll of Isaiah and reads from it and proclaims the fulfillment of what he reads. But, at any rate, it has become a book, that is to say something enclosed between two covers. It is, moreover, a library of books, a book containing within itself a great number of books, a wide variety of literature, things written at different times and in different places. Is it just a collection of literary artifacts from times and places long ago and far away? And if so, why read it now?

Because it speaks not only to particular cultures but beyond them. Something of the answer to the question ‘what is the Bible?’ is captured in this characteristic. What we call ‘the Bible’ bears witness to this phenomenon of speaking beyond the particular context and circumstance for which or about which a particular text was originally written. It also bears witness to the writing down in one context of what is remembered from another context. For example, the people of Israel wrote down and put together while in exile in Babylon what was remembered of God’s Word to them at the time of the Exodus from Egypt.

Somehow what is remembered and written down is received as being altogether definitive, as defining the fundamental identity of Israel in quite different political and cultural circumstances. Somehow what is written down cannot be constrained to just one context. It reaches beyond.

The point is captured best, perhaps, by St. Paul’s marvelous summary phrase: “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” The Bible in all its varied literary array, is inescapably what is written. Hence, it is ‘Scripture’ – what is written. And yet what is written is simply what is remembered as Revelation. The Bible is the witness of God’s Revelation.

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“Come and See”

Times of transition signal the occasions for renewal, for a beginning again. Nowhere do we see those occasions for renewed beginnings more profoundly than on this Sunday which is wonderfully named, The Sunday Next Before Advent – proxima ante. What a wonderful pile of prepositions! They serve to mark a turning point.

‘Next’ and ‘before’ are the prepositions here which position us before the truth. What truth? The truth of God’s Word coming towards us awakens us to the promise and hope of God’s Word with us in Jesus Christ. This Sunday is really about the gathering up of the moments of spiritual grace in the year past and positioning us to begin again. Such is the hope and wonder of Advent.

The ancient gospel story that was traditionally read on this Sunday for centuries upon centuries captures profoundly the meaning of that gathering and that positioning. It is the story in John’s Gospel of the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness where there is “the gather[ing] up [of] the fragments” left-over from the feast “that nothing be lost.” Read at this time of endings and beginnings, the end of the Trinity season and the beginning of Advent, it signals at once a Eucharistic theme and an Eschatological theme, that is to say, the idea of “the end of all things.” Eschatology means the last things – death, judgment, heaven and hell. That idea of an eschatological end only serves to bring us to the one in whom we have our beginning and our end, Jesus Christ. He is “the alpha and the omega” of our lives, something which the very architecture of this church reminds us with the alpha and omega beams directly above your heads, the very building preaching to you, as it were, about your spiritual path and identity and embracing you in the mystery of our life in Christ.

In following Christ, we have the hope of the gathering up of the spiritual moments of his grace in our lives, whether it means the little steps of progress against besetting sins and temptations to wickedness or the deeper awareness of those sins and wickedness stirring us to a renewed determination to do better. Such is Advent now so soon upon us and before us starting next Sunday.

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