Author: CCW

“Behold, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world”

We have come full circle, it may seem. Today’s Gospel ends with where we began on The Sunday Next Before Advent. In a way, Advent captures the whole of our lives in faith.

It signals the coming of God towards us. That is the first note. It signals as well the heightened awareness on our part about the coming of God towards us. That is the second note. Advent is simply and entirely holy waiting and holy watching – our watching and our waiting upon God, upon the God who comes to us with grace and salvation, with healing and forgiveness. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” John the Baptist says in today’s Gospel.

Such is our beginning and our ending to which this week of the darkest night would bring us. It would bring us to Christ, the Lamb of God, the Word and Son of the Father who comes to us as the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world whose birth marks the beginning of the way of sacrificial love. He is the light of the world in every sense.

We can only watch and wait. It is the hardest thing for us, I fear, and yet, as always, the hardest things are the things most worth doing. We watch and wait upon God. There is our heightened awareness, our heightened expectancy – all of which are concentrated for us on this day.

But what makes this watching and waiting so hard? Because it is a watching and a waiting upon God. Without that all our advent preparations for Christmas are but tinsel and wrap, sounding brass and clanging cymbal, empty show and vain illusion. We so easily get lost in the busyness of our Christmas preparations. We are, I am afraid, simply too much with ourselves and not enough with God.

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“This is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.”

He is a prophet and yet more than a prophet for he stands on the brink of the fulfillment of all prophecy and yet he, too, is a figure in the darkness of Advent. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Such is the question of John the Baptist to Jesus about Jesus.

A question that he asks from prison, it reminds us that the wilderness of human pride and presumption is greater than the wilderness of Judaea. He is in prison, Matthew later explains, because he had the temerity to upbraid Herod the tetrarch, one of the Roman rulers, for marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias. Though Herod wanted to put John to death, he “feared the people,” and instead kept him in prison. But on Herod’s birthday, the daughter of Herodias, unnamed in the Gospels but named by the Jewish historian, Josephus, as Salome, danced before her uncle and step-father so pleasingly that he “promised to give her whatever she might ask”. At her mother, Herodias’ prompting, she asked for “the head of John the Baptist on a platter”, which request Herod reluctantly granted to her on account of his promise. And so John was beheaded. There is a cost when truth speaks to power.

The scene has captured the imagination of artists, poets, playwrights and musicians. The fuller story gives added poignancy to Jesus’ remarks about John the Baptist. He is the forerunner of Jesus not only by his birth and ministry but also by his witness and death. In every way, he is the messenger sent to prepare the way of Christ. And his ministry becomes an essential feature of the Church’s ministry, signalled so clearly in Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians and captured so beautifully in the Collect. “Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries” – referring to the mysteries of Christ – “may likewise” – after the example of John the Baptist, that is to say – “so prepare and make ready thy way.” How? “By turning the hearts of the disobedient,” my heart and yours, “to the wisdom of the just.” Tough, uncompromising stuff! And yet, it belongs precisely to the deep joys of the Advent preparation for Christmas.

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“My words shall not pass away”

What strong and disturbing words do we hear in this morning’s gospel! Almost as bad as the evening news or the weather report! “There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring.” Nothing really new about that – same old, same old – other than being far more eloquent than, perhaps, either the news or the weather!

And yet, it must surely give us pause, “men’s hearts failing them for fear”, anxious and worried on account of “looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.” There is a profoundly cosmic quality to these Scriptural warning notes which signal the Advent theme of judgment at once coming to us and ever present.

But exactly how, to use Cranmer’s words in his marvellous collect for this Sunday, do such disturbing warnings about judgment provide us with “patience and comfort of thy holy Word”, let alone “hope”? And yet that is precisely Jesus’ claim here. “My words shall not pass away.”

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