Christ Church

“Who art thou?”

The questions reverberate with great intensity in today’s Gospel. “Who are thou?” If not the Christ, then “Art thou Elijah?” If not Elijah, then “Art thou the Prophet?” If not the Prophet, then “Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?” Only then do we learn what Jesus told us last Sunday about John the Baptist as “more than a prophet”. He says of himself “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah.” Ego vox clamantis in deserto. This in turn leads to the last question. “And Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?”

This parade of questions might seem to correspond to our contemporary obsessions about personal identity. Rather it counters and corrects such tendencies. The whole scene is known as “the record” or “the witness of John,” meaning John the Baptist. It complements wonderfully the Epistle reading from Philippians that “the Lord is at hand.” And wonderfully so since this day, the Fourth Sunday in Advent, is also Christmas Eve. Both the readings and this day itself bring us to Christ in the meaning of his coming to us.

The questions of the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem”, later identified as Pharisees, point us to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human, namely, the desire to know. They show us that universal quest for knowledge, for meaning and understanding, not information. In a way, they anticipate and are like the “Magi from Anatolia,” seekers all. They are from Jerusalem, not in Jerusalem. They have come into the wilderness of “Bethany beyond Jordan” in the quest to know who John the Baptist is. The Christ, Elijah, the Prophet? “Who art thou?” The passage comes immediately after the Prologue of John’s Gospel, part of which is read at Christmas Eve. It focuses on the ministry of John the Baptist who prepares for the coming of Christ in us.

How? What is John’s ministry? Mark tells us concisely just after quoting this same passage from Isaiah that “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” But the baptism of John with water through the confession of sin is not the forgiveness of sins. Yet it signals the profound desire for forgiveness, a metanoia, a change in outlook and understanding in us. In other words, it highlights our desire for something more, for wholeness and truth. Thus, John the Baptist points us to Jesus. That is the point of this Gospel. As John the Baptist explains, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not: he it is who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.” And the very next day (as it will be literally for us}, “John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

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My Lord and My God

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,
A Baby in an ox’s stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

These are the last three verses from John Betjeman’s poem, “Christmas”.

Thomas is the Advent Saint who brings us to the mystery of Christmas. John Betjeman’s poem captures perfectly the underlying impulse of Thomas’ so-called doubting; it is really a kind of questioning and, as such, in pursuit of understanding. A Resurrection story, it recalls the appearance of Christ to the disciples who were huddled in fear behind closed doors on the evening of Easter Day. Thomas was not present with them. When he hears their report that “ we have seen the Lord,” he famously says, “except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

The Feast of St. Thomas falls just before the festival of Christ’s Nativity. The Resurrection and the Nativity are completely intertwined and it is the same question, a question about the reality of Christ’s embrace of our humanity, soul and body, that belongs to the radical truth of the Incarnation. Thomas’ question helps us to think about its radical meaning. The birth and passion of Christ reveal to us both the nature of God and a fuller view of our humanity. In a way, Thomas’ question is about the reality of Christ’s humanity and in turn his divinity.

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“What went ye out into the wilderness to see?”

The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on the last two Sundays of Advent. They begin today with John’s great question to Jesus: “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” That, in turn, leads to the rhetorical questions of Jesus to the multitude in the wilderness about John. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asks, with triple intensity. “What went ye out for to see?” “But what went ye out for to see?” In a wonderful paradox, Jesus’ questions to us point us to John who in turn points us to Jesus. Likewise, next Sunday the questions about John the Baptist by the “Priests and Levites from Jerusalem” lead to John the Baptist’s proclamation in “Bethany beyond Jordan” about Jesus as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

What are these advent questions really about? They awaken us to the redemption of our desires by placing our desires, what I am tempted to call the ‘bad infinity of our desires’ (schlechte unendlichkeit – with apologies to Hegel), with God in Christ . Such is the redemption of our desires. Our desires belong to prayer in the sense of longing but our longing itself is essentially tragic because it is a longing for what we do not have and cannot attain. It is a desire for this thing and that thing in an effort to find the truth of our desires which is always beyond us. Dante captures this sense of the endless restlessness of desire in the Convivio:

the infant intensely longing for an apple; and then, later on, for a little bird; and then, still further on, fine clothes; and then a horse; and then a mistress; then modest riches; then more; and then still more. And that is because in none of these things does it find that for which it ever seeks, and it believes to find it further on.

It belongs to human desire, as he puts it, to be always reaching out in one way or another. “And the reason is this: the deepest desire of each thing, arising from its very nature, is to return to its principle. And because God is the principle of our soul, and has made it like himself (as it is written, ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness’), the soul mightily desires to return to him;” in short, to God. Prayer, as George Herbert wonderfully says, is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” essentially encapsulating the same understanding.

All this is profoundly beautiful and true and yet it is both forgotten and denied in our contemporary world. Radically incomplete and reductive forms of thinking such as psychology, economics, and the social sciences, collectively captured in the term ‘sociologism’, displace theology and philosophy as the primary forms of thought. We have lost a sense of God and our humanity in their intrinsic and necessary interrelation. This leads to the reduction of all authority to “mere power detached from any intrinsic ordination to truth and goodness”. As the Italian philosopher and statesman, Augusto Del Noce observes, sociologism effectively “reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, expressions of the historical-social situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures or forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life”. Reducing all conceptions of the world to a kind of ‘social constructivism’ not only negates the transcendence of God and the givenness of creation but also itself since all human and social constructions depend upon principles prior to themselves. It is as if we are gods, making the world and God in our own image.

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