Christ Church

Link to the audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-communion for Advent 4

“And he confessed, I am not the Christ.”

There is a certain wonder, a sense of excitement and intensity, in the readings for The Fourth Sunday after Advent. “The Lord is at hand’, Paul tells us, near at hand. “I am not the Christ”, John tells us while pointing us to the one “who cometh after me” who is greater than me “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. The questions all seem to circle around the idea of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, upon whom the hopes of Israel all depend especially in the context of Roman oppression and persecution, but also taking on a more eschatological tone. Such things are seen through the lens of scriptural prophecy such as in Daniel and Ezra about the vindication of Israel by God. Yet the witness or record of John explicates those things through another register. “Behold the Lamb of God”, John says, upon seeing “Jesus coming unto him”, “which taketh away the sin of the world”, something more universal.

This ending phrase takes us back to the Gospel for The Sunday Next Before Advent, at least in our modern Canadian Prayer Book, where it is the opening or beginning phrase. We have come full circle. Yet that is the point of Advent and Christmas; it is all about our circling around and into the mystery of God and of the mystery of God with us. John’s witness is his confession of Christ as the expected Messiah albeit in a new and deeper register of meaning with the idea of sacrifice in the one who bears in himself all of the sins of our humanity and world. “Behold, the Lamb of God”, John says.

But what are we looking for? Advent is about the awakening to the desire for what is absolute, for God, without which all our other desires turn to conflict and animosity, to division and enmity. Nothing is more clear in the climate of endless division and self-certainty that defines our post-Christian secular culture. John is pointing us to something very different and yet universally significant. He identifies the one who comes as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Can we really delude ourselves about the sin of the world? Can we really imagine that the sin of the world is everybody else except us? In a way, this is our modern dualistic dilemma. We demonize the other in order to assert ourselves and in so doing deny God. What you have done unto the least of these my brethren, you have done unto me, Jesus says in Matthew’s Apocalyptic vision. This is the contradiction of our age. The autonomous self confronts every other autonomous self. To put it simply, we are not self-complete but interdependent and dependent upon God.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Advent 3

“Art thou he that should come?”

“How shall this be?” Mary asks the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. Advent, too, is all annunciation, we might say. “Art thou he that should come?” John the Baptist in prison asks Jesus by way of two of his disciples. Jesus in turn asks the multitudes with repeated intensity about John the Baptist, “what went ye out for to see?” The questions of Advent call us to account because they call us into the presence of God at once always present and yet always coming to us. The question the city asks in the Gospel for Advent 1, namely, “Who is this?”, is really the question about  ’who is God?’ and ‘who is God with us?’

At issue is our awareness of God, the divine light enlightening the darkness of our minds again and again in the ways of our coming to God. The questions illuminate an important feature of our humanity. They signal the desire to know, the eros, the passionate desire to know, as Plato teaches. We are created to know ‘each in accord with the capacity of the beholder to behold’. Man desires and delights to praise God, Augustine teaches (“laudare te vult homo… ut laudare te delectet”). It belongs to our nature to know, Aristotle says. That in turn presupposes that there is something to be learned, something to be known. “For thou hast created us for thyself, and our hearts are restless – inquietum – until they find their rest in thee” (Augustine, Confessions 1.1).

This goes a long way towards countering several different modern dilemmas about whether education is in any way possible. The question that John the Baptist has his disciples ask Jesus informs the wonderful and beautiful Matin Responsory of Palestrina, sometimes sung at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, quoting the Gospel directly, “Tell us, art thou he that should come?”

The great readings of the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols are all prefaced by introductory phrases that give the service a clearly Christian context and meaning. The two readings from Genesis, the three readings from Isaiah, and the reading from Micah all locate certain themes in terms of their fulfillment in Christ signalled in the readings from Luke, Matthew, and John. The whole sequence forms a narrative arc going from the story of the Fall to the radical meaning of redemption in the Word made flesh, from separation to restoration, as it were, but all through a kind of meditation on the meaning of God with us, Emmanuel. But that idea of the Word made flesh coming to us through the pageant of the Word written and proclaimed belongs to a larger consideration about the nature of education and about our lives in faith. In other words, though the service is explicitly Christian, it is not exclusively so since it touches upon the logos-centric nature of God as Word, as intellectual-principle, as it were, summed up in the 9th Lesson from John’s Prologue, itself the great Gospel of Christmas.

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