Author: CCW

Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, Meek and sitting upon an ass

This Advent Gospel challenges all our assumptions about Advent. It is the story familiar to you from Palm Sunday, the story of Christ’s ‘triumphant’ entry into Jerusalem. Yet it signals the deeper meaning of Advent, not just as the season of penitential adoration and preparation for Christmas, which it certainly is, but even more in terms of the doctrine of Advent as the Revelation that holds all things together in the mind and heart of God.

Jesus comes as King, stepping into the expectations of Zechariah’s joyous prophecy about the coming of a Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ. He comes as King but what a strange kind of kingship! He comes without any of the trappings of military and worldly power. He comes, gentle and meek, sitting upon an ass, and the colt the foal of an ass. He does not come in worldly pomp and glory, but in the gentle humility of Zechariah’s vision and hope.

And yet as Zechariah goes on to say, he comes to “command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea”, the motto of Canada, we might note. But what is this kingship and peace, what is this dominion? It completely overturns all our assumptions about power and might and authority. Yet this Gospel inaugurates Advent. It highlights the more radical meaning of Advent as the constant coming of God to us, the Word of God in Law and Prophecy, in Gospel and Service. He comes as Light and Life, and ultimately, as “the Word made flesh”. It is all about what comes to us in the darkness of our world and day. Advent quite simply is God’s Word and very Person who is always coming to us. We can only enter into the meaning of what we see and hear. Advent recalls us to the truth of our lives as found in God.

This is the great joy of this scene. The multitudes sense that something special is happening even if they are unclear about what it means. Hosannas are sung. Branches are cut down from the trees and spread in the way. A procession, to be sure, but hardly much in the way of something regal and astounding, not much in the way of all that jazz.

Yet “all the city was moved, saying, who is this?” It seems that some of the people of Israel pick up on Zechariah’s imagery but not everyone. Here is the first of the great Advent questions that belong to Advent as Revelation. “The multitude said, This is Jesus the Prophet of Nazareth of Galilee”. Bethlehem and Nazareth are all part of the Christmas story, to be sure, which includes references to Jerusalem, but the Jesus who comes as “Thy King” is the King of all Creation. He is God of God and God with us; something which we can only come to know by attending to the pageant of the everlasting Advent of God coming towards us.

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“Where dwellest thou?”

Endings and beginnings are times of transition. We come to the end of the Trinity season and thus to the beginning of a new Church year in Advent. The title for this day with its collection of prepositions highlights this: The Sunday Next Before Advent. But the transition is not simply about going from one thing to another in a kind of linear progression or as trapped in an endless and futile cycle like squirrels in a cage. While this transition maps onto the changes in the natural world, at least for us in the western hemisphere in the twilight of nature’s year, there is something more that we behold. It speaks to the constant conversion of our souls, to the fundamental activities of our life in Christ in terms of the interplay of paradise and wilderness that shapes the meaning of the Christian pilgrimage.

“The way up and the way down are one and the same”, Heraclitus states. What that means for us by way of another metaphor is a constant circling around the principle of all life and light, God. This is the radical meaning of repentance, our “turning back to find, in the end what is really our beginning”. In this sense it is a return to paradise but in that return something changes because we come to know it for the first time. It is equally our end, “to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot beautifully puts it. That is to know our beginning as our end, and thus as something more. It means a new change in us; in melius renovabimur, as Augustine says, “we shall be changed into something better.”

Eliot’s East Coker poem in the Four Quartets begins with the phrase, “in my beginning is my end” and concludes with the phrase, “in my end is my beginning”. It is a wonderful reflection upon this idea of the interplay of beginnings and endings. And it is not by accident that the Matins Old Testament reading for today is from Ecclesiastes: “the end of the matter; all has been heard, Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12. 13).

The wilderness is the place of law, of learning. The Epistle reading from Jeremiah highlights the theme of justification, of what is learned in the wilderness both by way of reference to the Exodus and to the Babylonian Exile. Yet in both cases there is a looking to paradise. In the wilderness journey there are those moments when wilderness is transformed into paradise such as the manna from on high and the stricken rock out of which pours the healing water; wilderness as paradise.

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