Christ Church

“Go and show John again those things which ye do see and hear”

There are two outstanding biblical figures in the spiritual landscape of Advent. They are John the Baptist and Mary, Virgin and Mother. They come together on this day and week in the progress of Advent and in wonderful ways complement one another. On the Advent wreath, the rose or pink candle is lit in remembrance of Mary’s role in the coming of Christ.

Monday just passed was the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a commemoration that has always been part of the Prayer Book calendar since 1549. Though not mentioned in the Scripture, it belongs to the theology of the Incarnation and complements the Advent Ember Day Gospel of the story of the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary. The reading of that Gospel in Advent concentrates simply on the angelic announcement and not on Mary’s verbal response. Yet these two moments – her conception and Annunciation – belong to her role and purpose in Christ’s Incarnation.

Her conception is about her coming to be even as the Annunciation looks back to the first moment of Christ’s Incarnation – his being conceived in her womb. Her Annunciation is his Conception! The Gospel reading at the very least reminds us of her Annunciation through her fiat mihi, her ‘yes’ to God and as such teaches what belongs to the real truth and meaning of our humanity and life in prayer: “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

But that, too, is the point of the ministry of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. He is in prison owing to the machinations of Herod’s wife, Herodias, who seeks his annihilation. His being in prison is another form of the darkness of Advent and yet points us to the light of Christ. In the marvel of revelation, Jesus speaks to the multitudes concerning John with a barrage of recurring questions. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” “What went ye for to see?” And again, “What went ye out for to see?” All this calls attention to the ministry of John the Baptist. Only then does he tell us his real significance: he is at once a prophet and more than a prophet.

Jesus points us to John the Baptist who points out Jesus to us next Sunday as “the Lamb of God”. John the Baptist’s ministry as the Evensong lesson makes clear is a ministry of preaching a baptism of water for repentance. His message is the Advent mantra: “Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He bids the Pharisees and Sadducees to “bear fruit that befit repentance.” But more importantly, he points to the coming of one, he says, who is “mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry;” one who “will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire” and in whose hand is the winnowing fork that will separate the wheat from the chaff.

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“Remember then what you received and heard; keep that and repent”

I am tempted to call this sermon, ‘Why we need hell’. The answer is not to have a place to put our enemies and those who trouble us, nor is it meant to scare us into heaven, as it were, in contrast to the usual and depressing parade of human miseries. The reason, paradoxically, has more to do with the reality of hope itself and the redemption of the truth of our desires. As the poet/theologian Dante so clearly teaches, hell is about getting exactly what you want which is not the same thing as what you think it is. Hell is for those who have lost, as he puts it, “the good of intellect”, for those who have not remembered or better yet, have not wanted to remember what we have “received and heard” and so have not “kept the word” and thus, have not repented, as the letter to the Church in Sardis in Revelation puts it. They have, Dante suggests, “abandoned all hope.” The key word is abandoned; it is a matter of our will and our reason.

Our text from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which we read in the Evening Offices from the week of the Sunday Next Before Advent through the following three weeks of Advent, and which is from this morning’s second lesson at Matins, complements the eucharistic readings and echoes Matthew’s Apocalypse, his wake-call to what abides and ever is. “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.” We find our hope and joy in that ever-abiding and eternal word of God paradoxically in the experience of the passing away of all things finite considered in themselves. Such finite realities are not nothing: they have their truth and meaning in the abiding and eternal word of God whose “words shall not pass away.”

It is not just about the catastrophes and impending senses of endism whether in the various forms of eco-apocalyptism or global social, economic, political, and psychological distresses – all wonderfully contracted in Matthew’s “distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear.” This is an aspect of our world, a world of fears, of troubles and tribulations rather fully comprehended and catalogued in the Litany. But whether in good times or bad, we are bidden to “look up and lift up our heads for our redemption draweth nigh”. That is of a different nature and order than our immediate and worldly idolatries of the practical and the technological, ourselves in our presumptions and now in our fears. Rather it is about looking to God in the motions of his Word towards us.

That Word is, inescapably, a word of judgment, a word calling us to account, a word that convinces our hearts of the reality of God and his kingdom by which our lives are measured and, inescapably, found wanting. Hope comes into play precisely at this point. In the awareness of an objective measure and standard to which we are accountable, we are brought before the absolute goodness of God. At the point where human desires discover their limitations, something more is opened out to us that is beyond ourselves and our doings.

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