Christ Church

“Art thou he that should come?”

The voice of one crying in the wilderness cries out from the wilderness of prison. It is the voice of John the Baptist, identified in the Gospel and the Collect as the messenger sent by God to prepare the way of Christ before him. He is, as Jesus says, a prophet and yet more than a prophet. His ministry signals the nature of the ministry of the Christian Church as belonging to the Advent of God and to the radical meaning of God’s coming to us. The ministry, too, belongs to the doctrine and the season of Advent.

What is that ministry? The task and vocation of “the ministers and stewards of the mysteries of Christ” is to prepare and make ready his way in us. How? By “turn[ing] the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.” And that is exactly why John is in prison. Both Matthew and Mark give us the fuller story elsewhere in their Gospels about why John in prison sends two of his disciples to ask Jesus the great Advent question, “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” “Who is this?” all the city of Jerusalem asked as we heard on the first Sunday in Advent in the Gospel reading inserted into our Canadian Prayer Book. The questions of Advent belong to the doctrine of Advent. It is about nothing less and nothing more than our awakening and being opened to what comes from God to us.

Advent is our watching and waiting upon the motions of God’s love coming to us in a variety of registers: there is God’s Word coming in Law and Prophecy, in judgement and mercy, in mente and in carne, in mind and in flesh. It is all about what comes from God to us, on the one hand, and our being awakened to its meaning, on the other hand. What is that awakening in us? It is the awareness of our need for something more than ourselves, our awareness of the sin and darkness in us that stands in the way of the good which we rightly seek but do not have of ourselves. This is all part and parcel of what will be known as “the witness of John” whose ministry is essential to the life and mission of the Church as nothing less and nothing more than the body of Christ and to the possibilities of his life in us. Repentance and rejoicing go together on this day, sometimes known as Gaudete Sunday. The term, “rejoice,” refers to the ancient introit of the Mass taken from Philippians which is the Epistle reading for next Sunday.

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“My words shall not pass away”

“We have here no continuing city,” Hebrews reminds us, “but we seek one to come.” In a litany of figures from the history of Israel, that is what “those who died in faith,” he says, looked for but did not receive, though trusting in the promises of God. What they ultimately looked for was not simply a return to the promised land after exile, he suggests, for “now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly.” I have been thinking about these words in relation to today’s readings because they belong to the strong doctrine of the Scriptures and to a way of thinking the Scriptures, a way of reasoning through the signs to the things signified.

The Scriptures are what Paul here identifies as “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.” He is actually speaking about the Hebrew Scriptures but the idea extends to the whole of the Scriptures, to what Christians understood several centuries later as the Old Testament and the New Testament, or simply the Bible. The Bible is really a library of books written over a vast range of years and centuries by many different hands and in many different voices. What gives the Hebrew Scriptures a kind of unity? Even more, what gives the Bible in its various forms a unity? I think Paul’s sensibility is deeply true, “they were written for our learning,” literally for teaching in the Greek, for our doctrine in the Latin.

What thunders forth to us on the Second Sunday in Advent is the profound idea, first, that things are written for a purpose, and, second, that the purpose is our learning. It is the idea of things being made known that are capable in some sense or other of being grasped by us. Therein lies the challenge and the necessity of thinking the Scriptures, pondering the images through which we enter into an understanding of the things of God. What thunders forth in today’s Gospel is the powerful idea that the words of God “shall not pass away.” They are eternal. What does that mean except that through the passing forms of human thought and experience, through the ups and downs of history, something everlasting and universal is known for thought? “That we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.”

The theology of the Epistle and Gospel is captured in Cranmer’s Collect. It expresses a fundamental truth not only for Anglicans but for orthodox Christians in every age. It speaks to the centrality of the Scriptures for the understanding of the Faith and for the hope that the Scriptures open to us, “the blessed hope of everlasting life,” the idea that we are made “partakers of the divine nature,” citizens of “an heavenly city” all the while we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” It articulates an essential attitude of approach to the reading of the Scriptures: “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.”

The Scriptures have come down to us through traditions of interpretation which are based upon this principle of the centrality of the Scriptures. But insofar as they are for thought, there is the necessity of our engagement with them. What is that engagement? It is our seeking to enter into the meaning of what is written and proclaimed. That doesn’t mean that the Scriptures are simply there for us to interpret in any way we might choose, as if, proverbially, the Scriptures were but a nose of wax to be twisted and turned in whatever fashion at any time. Or to put it in modern parlance, there is ‘your truth’ and there is ‘my truth,’ and hence no truth, or the reduction of the Scriptures to ‘this is what it means to me.’ That leads really to a kind of meaninglessness.

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