Author: CCW

“In the path of thy judgments, O Lord, we wait for thee;
thy memorial name is the desire of our souls”

Two figures dominate the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, the Mother of our Lord. Together they illuminate something of the meaning of Advent for us and especially so on The Third Sunday in Advent which focuses on the ministry of repentance of John the Baptist and on the theme of gaudate, rejoicing, imaged in the rose candle of the Advent Wreath, reminding us of Mary’s role in salvation. The one points to Christ; the other carries the hope of the world in her womb. Nothing can come to birth in us unless their complementary yet contrasting attitudes to Christ are realised in our lives.

Advent is the season of penitential adoration. We are reminded of the darkness and the light. There is the darkness of sin by which we are less than ourselves. There is the light in which we find ourselves. The truth of our humanity is to be found in the truth of God. We have to say ‘no’ to the darkness in order to say ‘yes’ to the light.

The repentance that John the Baptist calls us to is not about a guilt trip – more beating up on ourselves or feeling sorry for ourselves. It is, instead, an honest recognition of the mystery of sin and the honest recognition of ourselves as sinners. It is captured in our confession of sin in its eloquent honesty that “we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep”, that “we have followed too much the devices and desires our own hearts”, that “we have offended against thy holy laws” in “thought” if not in “word and deed”, that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done”, that “we have done those things which we ought not to have done”. Who isn’t caught up in this net of understanding? The conclusion is inescapably obvious that “there is no health in us”. We are not perfect and complete. It may be, as Shakespeare put it, that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark”, but, more importantly, there is something rotten in us, in you and me, I am bound to say.

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“A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet”

We live in the meantime between the already and the not yet, between the first coming and the second coming of Christ. Advent prepares us not just for Christ’s holy birth in Bethlehem but also for his coming again in glory at the end of time. “He shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: Whose kingdom shall have no end,” we just professed in the Nicene Creed. And in the Apostles’ Creed, Christ “sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” And more fully, and perhaps more disturbingly, the Athanasian Creed proclaims that Christ “Ascended into heaven, sat down at the right hand of the Father,/ from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead./ At whose coming all men must rise again with their bodies,/ and shall give account for their own deeds./ And they that have done good will go into life eternal;/ they that have done evil into eternal fire.” Wow! We probably don’t want to hear this and yet it belongs to the great good news of the Gospel. It is what is prayed in the great Eucharistic prayer, “remembering the precious death of thy beloved Son, his mighty resurrection, and glorious ascension,” things that are already, but then “looking for his coming again in glory,” to what is not yet.

That there is judgment means there is truth; that there is judgment means that our thoughts, words and deeds mean something.

All these creedal and liturgical statements are scriptural. They reflect a recurring theme about God’s engagement with our humanity and about the redemption of our humanity in Christ. The judgment, as today’s Epistle makes clear is God’s judgment, not mine, not yours, come what may in the experiences of tyranny and corruption, disorder and disarray, death and destruction in our world and day.

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“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”

These are Elizabeth’s words upon the occasion of Mary coming “with haste into the hill country of Judaea” to visit her aged cousin just after the Angel Gabriel announced that she who is “highly favoured” is to “conceive in [her] womb” and “give birth to a child who will be called holy, the Son of God.”

And yet, today we commemorate another conception, the conception of Mary herself. How paradoxical that we should commemorate an event which has no biblical basis whatsoever in the week of The Second Sunday in Advent, the Sunday that signals so strongly an Anglican sensibility about the centrality of the Scriptures as revelation, about the Anglican understanding of sola scriptura, we might say! How to reconcile that strong sensibility of the purpose and the defining force of the Scriptures with this non-biblical feast?

It signals to us, I think, that sola scriptura is to be understood creedally or doctrinally and not just in a positivistic or literalist fashion. The Scriptures are God’s word “written for our learning” and part of that learning has to do with our thinking upon the Word of God in all the fullness of its meaning. That means the Creeds, themselves an intellectual reflection upon the Scriptures without which it would be hard to say how the Scriptures are the Scriptures beyond dogmatic assertion and which provide us with a way to think the Scriptures without getting bogged down in a quagmire of contradictions. No. There is a deeper purpose and meaning to sola scriptura at least in some of its Anglican forms.

That deeper purpose and meaning has altogether to do with the priority of doctrine. Mary is absolutely critical to the meaning and understanding of God coming to us in “the Word made flesh.” There is no thinking upon the Incarnation without due regard to the role and place of Mary. She is “the Mother of God” as orthodox theology insists, “blessed among women,” as Elizabeth proclaims. And what is her blessedness? That she is “the handmaid of the Lord,” the one who says ‘yes’ to God, and whose ‘yes’ results in Christ’s conception and holy birth, He who is Lord and Saviour, both God and Man; “God of God,” to be sure, but man through her. He is the Lord with us because the Lord is with her.

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“Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away”

Strong words, but then, this is a day of strong words, strong words reminding us of the strength and power of God’s Word coming to us in judgment and in hope.

“Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” St. Paul tells us in a powerful passage signifying the fundamental idea of a theology of revelation, a point by no means lost on the architect of common prayer and the author of the fine and wonderful collect for The Second Sunday in Advent, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. The collect captures and establishes an entire Anglican sensibility about the purpose of Scripture as revelation. Something is made known to us about the high things of God and about our lives with God in the witness of the Scriptures and through the creedal tradition of the Church faithful to that witness. The issue for our day is whether we are willing to hear and receive that Word coming so powerfully to us.

“That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.” Hope. Hope for something more beyond the struggles and limits of human experience. And yet there can be no hope without the theme of judgment awakening us to the reality of the human situation, described so powerfully and accurately in the Gospel. There shall be, it seems, “upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth”. It seems? Let’s be frank. There is much to disturb and trouble us in our own world and day, in our own church and country, in our own hearts and souls. To deny this would be utter folly.

It would also mean to deny the true desire of our hearts which is always for something more beyond the agony and the pain of the conflicts and divisions within and among ourselves. But where the Word of God is faithfully proclaimed and the Sacraments faithfully celebrated, there and then “know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand”. Such are the signs of the presence of God with us. These lessons are a strong reminder to us of the very nature of the liturgy and its purpose. It is about our being faithfully with the one who comes in judgment and in hope.

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