Author: CCW

“I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness”

“Christianity,” Ignatius of Antioch observes in his letter to the Romans, “lies in achieving greatness in the face of the world’s hatred.” He was on his way under Imperial Guard to face martyrdom in Rome in the first decade of the 2^nd century. He was no stranger to the world’s hatred. Yet he understood something greater than the powers of the world, namely, the power of God’s Truth and Word Incarnate in Jesus Christ.

He exemplifies something of the prophetic qualities of John the Baptist who in the great Gospel for The Fourth Sunday in Advent reveals the true nature of his ministry and life. He does not live for himself but for another, “the latchet of whose shoes,” he says, he is “not worthy to unloose.” He points not to himself but to Christ, to Christ as the Lamb of God, the one whom, he says, “takes away the sin of the world.”

It is a powerful testimony. Known as the record or witness of John, there is poignancy and an intensity to what we hear and see. In the to-and-fro of questions with the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem,” we glimpse a spiritual tension and frisson belonging to cultures in their moments of crisis and uncertainty. Who are you and what are you about? they ask, in genuine puzzlement, it seems to me. Their questions serve to bring out the truth of John the Baptist and even more the truth of Christ which he serves. Nowhere is the ministry of John the Baptist more concentrated for us; nowhere does prophecy point us so directly to Christ. In the Christian understanding of things, prophecy finds its fulfillment in Christ Jesus. He is Immanuel, God with us, and that essential insight changes everything.

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This is the second of two Advent Meditations on the theme “Mary in Holy Waiting”. The first is posted here.

“Blessed are those servants, whom their lord when he cometh shall find watching”

Watching and waiting are the spiritual activities of the soul in the season of Advent. They signify our looking towards God, our looking expectantly at the coming of God’s Word and Son. Mary in Advent is in Holy Waiting; a waiting upon the fullness of time, upon the birth of God’s Word and Son through her. Her waiting is the watching and waiting of the Church upon the motions of God’s Word coming to birth in us.

Tonight also marks the commemoration of Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch and martyr. His commemoration complements our Advent programme about Mary in Holy Waiting. One of the Apostolic Fathers, that is to say, one of the early figures of the Christian Church who, whether they knew the Apostles personally or directly (some may have, some may have not), nonetheless preserved and transmitted “the apostolic teaching and tradition between the time of the Apostles themselves and the latter years of the second century” (Max Staniforth, To A.L.M. (Intro) to the Apostolic Fathers).  Ignatius was martyred, c. 115, after an episcopal career of some forty years. A figure of great renown, we actually know very little about him apart from his character that is revealed in his seven remarkable epistles written on the road to his martyrdom in Rome. We do not even know the exact charge which led to his martyrdom.

His epistles bring out, I suggest, the essential Marian quality of watching and waiting upon the Word and Will of God. Three things stand out in his epistles: his embrace of martyrdom; his insistence upon the three-fold ministry of the Church, especially episcopacy; and his emphasis upon the doctrine of the Incarnation against the Jews and the Docetists – the latter being the term for the earliest heresy of the Church, already attacked in the epistles of John, that claims that the human life of Christ is all a kind of play-acting, a sham, a mere appearance in contrast to reality since the idea of God becoming man is abhorrent where matter is seen as evil and spirit as good and pure.

In many ways, Ignatius’ epistles already point in the direction of a creedal understanding of the Christian faith that will emerge more explicitly in the fourth century. The key doctrine for him is the Incarnation which leads to his conviction about martyrdom and about the ordered life of the Church. His epistles breath that positive spirit of living for and with Christ already signified in Mary’s fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word,” the idea of our life with God because of God’s embrace of our humanity. For Ignatius this wonder contributes to a new sensibility, a conviction about immortality such that martyrdom is the necessary witness to the truth of Christianity, a martyrdom which he enthusiastically accepts like Mary’s “be it unto me according to thy word.” In a world of suicide bombers, this may trouble us but if we look more closely we can see how different this Ignatian/Marian sense of commitment and witness is from these contemporary acts in which martyrdom is really an act of terrorism for political purposes to which religious concepts have been sadly twisted and perverted.

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“Go and tell John again those things which ye so hear and see.”

A sermon, snowstorm notwithstanding! Hearing and seeing are the two most intellectual of the physical senses. We use the sense of sight and hearing as metaphors for understanding. “I see what you mean,” we may say to someone in conversation, meaning we understand what they are saying. “I hear you,” we might assert, suggesting much the same thing, an agreement or at least an acknowledgement about the meaning of what is being said.

In a way, such use of language is commonplace and every day. We forget perhaps how profound it is and how it speaks to the very features of our humanity that make us who we are. In the quiet darkness of Advent, we can learn again about the power of words that illumine our minds and encourage our hearts. It is the point of today’s Scriptures and signals the ministry of the Church. It is about preparing and making ready the way of the Lord in human hearts “by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” that we may be found “an acceptable people in [God’s] sight.”

Our darkness brought into the light of God is part of the process of learning. Advent is the season of teaching. God as Word and Light “brings to light the hidden things of darkness” and “makes manifest the counsels of the hearts,” as Paul puts it. To what end? That “every one shall have praise of God.” It is not simply judgment but joy and salvation.

The light of Advent teaches us what God seeks for our humanity. That is part and parcel of the power of this Gospel reading and, by extension, part and parcel of the faithful ministry of “the ministers and stewards of [the] mysteries” of God. John the Baptist belongs to that pattern of prophetic preparation for the coming of Christ. He is in prison, the victim of the power politics of his day, a victim of speaking truth to power but, as such, a martyr and a witness to the power and truth of God. His questions illuminate the dark landscape of Advent. His questions point us to Jesus. “Art thou he that should come, or do we seek for another?”

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