Author: CCW

“He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light”

What light? The light which is Christ. Christ is “essential light” without whose light we are blind, and, like the parable in today’s Gospel, “hypocrites,” who lead one another astray, the proverbial “blind leading the blind.” It is an ancient commonplace about a critique of leadership, on the one hand, and about a self-critique of our own self-certainties and judgmentalism, on the other hand. But who is the “witness of that light?” John the Baptist. We stand on the cusp and eve of the midsummer’s festival of the Nativity of John the Baptist. In a way his witness marks the beginning and end of our summer reflections (at least here in the Maritimes!) with his Nativity tomorrow and his martyrdom, the Beheading of John the Baptist, in late August, itself another kind of nativity. Birth and death go together. As dying, we live.

There are only two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Church: the Nativity of Christ and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The latter coincides with the summer solstice, the longest day, and points us to Christ’s winter birth, the fons et origo of Christian life and faith, the longest night in which the greatest light is made manifest. John’s Nativity celebrates the purpose of his very being and so, too, of our lives. It is captured in our text: “He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light.” Along with the witness of Christ to himself and the witness of the Father to his only-begotten Son, there is the witness of human testimony as inspired by the Spirit. The whole life of John the Baptist is a witness to the one who comes who is greater than himself, the one for whom he is sent to prepare his way.

He points not to himself but to Christ but even more to Christ in us. Such is the necessity of the preaching of John the Baptist. He comes for the purpose of “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Yet John is not himself the forgiveness of sins; only the instrument of God preparing us for the coming and indwelling of Christ in us. This is what Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans, too, is reminding us: “the whole creation is waiting for the revelation of the sons of God” in whom we “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” That mercy is what Luke highlights at the same time as showing what stands in its way: our being blind to ourselves and to one another is about our being blind to God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

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“Rejoice with me”

The parables in today’s Gospel illustrate wonderfully the teaching in the Epistle. Not only does “God resist the proud and gives grace to the humble,” but that grace conveys us unto glory for God “himself shall restore, stablish and strengthen you … after that ye have suffered a while.” God is “the God of all grace” and the parables illustrate the nature and the immensity of God’s grace.

The parables come as a response to an accusation. Christ is accused of receiving sinners and eating with them, thereby identifying himself with sinners, being made sin himself, as it were; condemned by association. But Christ’s response shows that he does this, not so as to be defined by sin, “he who knew no sin,” but for the sake of our redemption, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He tells three parables, two of which comprise today’s gospel: the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin. Beyond them, but as the completion of them, is the parable of the lost or prodigal son.

Sheep, coins, sons. There is a progression to these images. They belong together. I like to think of their interrelation artistically as forming a kind of triptych of divine grace in which the centre panel would be the parable of the prodigal son framed by the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. We only come to its central message through those two parables which stress the priority of divine grace in our restoration. What is emphasised is God’s reaching down to us in the gravity of our sins which separate us from God and from the community of divine love. There is, after all, a kind of passivity to sheep and coins, but this only serves to heighten the activity of God’s grace. Yet the effects of that grace are to be realised in us which is what we are given to see in the parable of the prodigal son. In him we see the motions of God’s grace in us that cause our restoration to grace, our establishment in grace, and our being strengthened by grace.

The parable of the prodigal son completes the illustration of the teaching about God’s redemptive grace. It signifies the strong and exultant note of God’s mercy towards us. What, after all, is the recurring theme here except the theme of rejoicing? More joy in heaven in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just persons.

God seeks the lost and God accepts the penitent who makes some motion of return to him for that motion is the motion of God’s grace in him. The first two parables make this point unmistakably clear. The sheep and the coins are utterly incapable of moving towards God. God’s grace literally picks them up and carries them, gathers them up to himself and to the community which his love alone creates. We are reminded that our joy is to be found in the free gift of God towards us in the giving of his Son.

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