Advent 3
It is the
Sunday for rejoicing, traditionally know as ‘Gaudete’ Sunday ‘Rejoice’ is the
proclamation of the prophet. Mary sings her Magnificat and the purple of Advent
is put away for a day. We light the pink candle in the Advent ring and it could
almost seem as though we are celebrating Christmas early.
But John the
Baptist is in prison, in the condemned cell from which he will never emerge in
on piece. For him, things couldn’t be worse. The doubts and fears crowd in on
him. Is this really the Messiah? Will he rescue John the Baptist and drive out
Herod and all the Romans? Is this salvation? What is there to rejoice about?
As we heard
in our readings, Jesus quotes the prophet in listing the signs that are being
fulfilled. ‘The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for
joy.’ Yes, it is happening, but is it enough? Tell John that, but the rest of
the message should probably not reach his ears. So, after John’s disciples left,
those who remained heard this. ‘Among those born of women no one has arisen
greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is
greater than he.’
John would
die not knowing the whole of Jesus’s message, and, infinitely more important, would
not know of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Three of the gospels are written
from the point of view of what people knew before Easter Day. They
reconstructed the story as though no-one knew what was to come. I believe St.
John, knowing of these accounts of the life of Jesus, wrote a very different
gospel, one bathed in the light of the resurrection and using this event to
shine a light on the meaning of the incarnation and the ministry of Jesus. I
have good authority for saying this, because I am quoting Professor David Ford
who has spent the last 19 years writing, with periods of careful reading with
colleagues, the gospel of John. John, he would claim, knew about those accounts
of the life of Christ which attempted to reconstruct what it was like at the
time, with all the misunderstandings and doubts which everyone, including the
disciples shared. But John writes in the full knowledge of these gospels, his
personal knowledge of Jesus, and his experience of the resurrection.
John the
Baptist did not, could not, know that Jesus would rise from the dead and that
his resurrection would be the ultimate vindication on his ministry. So Jesus
says ‘Among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the
Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ This is no
criticism of John, but a simple report that no-one could have known that, with
the resurrection of Jesus, John the Baptist, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the whole of the
rest of them, the psalmist and the lot would share in the resurrection of God’s
Son.
And there is
this ultimate difference between the messiah and earthly kings. ‘What then did
you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft
robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I
tell you, and more than a prophet.’
There will
also be a fundamental difference between the message of Jesus and that of the
prophets including John the Baptist. And there will be a fundamental difference
between people’s imaginings about the Messiah and Jesus, the Son of God. Some
of this difference is clear in today’s reading from Isaiah. ‘Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.’
God does not
save you by beating up everyone else. It is not this situation which my 4 year
old grandson imagines in his games, where there are good guys and bad guys, and
the good guys have free rein to beat up the bad guys. In the creation God made
they are all, we are all, children of God. But it is just possible that John
the Baptist didn’t understand who was coming. For example, he described the
Messiah in these terms, ‘His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear
his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff
he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ It could sound very like the 4-year old’s
game of bad guys and good guys. But, apart from healing the blind and the lame,
what did Jesus do?
When they showed
Jesus a woman who had been taken in the very act of adultery, he said very
clearly ‘Let the person who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Those who
were claiming to be the good guys were unmasked.
He says ‘‘Do
not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you
will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do
you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your
own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, “Let me take the speck out of
your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log
out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of
your neighbour’s eye.’
He accepted
invitations to dinner from tax collectors and sinners, and was criticised for
it. But then, he says in today’s gospel, ‘blessed is anyone who takes no
offence at me.’
And, following
today’s gospel, Jesus says ‘But to what will I compare this generation? It is
like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another, “We played
the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.”
For John
came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of
Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a
friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’
Those who
take offence at Jesus will be unable to discern that this is God at work.
However, I’m
reminded that we need to say this with some care. I have just read the report
by the C of E Faith and Order Commission about our relations with Jews. This is
an important issue which has tarnished some of the political discourse recently,
when it should have been laid to rest years ago. The report doesn’t give me any
advice about how to interpret Jesus’ words in tonight’s gospel, ‘Among those
born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in
the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ There is a danger of seeing this
text as proclaiming a kind of Christian triumphalism. And there is no escaping
the fact that Christianity and Judaism are different, but then Judaism today is
very different from the faith of those who worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem,
and Christianity today different from that of those who wrote the gospels.
In all this
I find, as did those on the commission, help from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans
(9) in which he attempts to heal divisions between Jewish and Gentile Christians.
He says ‘I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for
the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are
Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the
giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the
patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is
over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.
But this does
not help me interpret the gospel text from Matthew, so I shall try an approach
like that of the 4th gospel. let me offer you an image of the
Baptist which sees him from the perspective of St. John’s gospel.
The
traditional picture of the crucifixion, like that on the rood screen in this
church, has the crucified Christ in the centre flanked by the weeping figures
of the beloved disciple and the mother of Jesus. In the famous Isenheim
altarpiece, the scene is radically different. It was created for a hospital,
where dying men and women who were beyond the help, but not beyond the care of
an order of religious, were placed in their beds to allow them to contemplate
religious images. In the tortured figure of Christ on the cross all the pain of
the terminally ill patients in the hospital is conveyed in gruesome detail. The
agony of Jesus is intolerable. And his beloved disciple, instead of standing on
his side of the cross, has rushed across to comfort Jesus’ weeping
mother.
The
renaissance, around 1500, was a time for startling new religious images, of
great theological depth. The best known is Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ showing the
moment when every disciple finds himself accused. At Isenheim the traditional
altarpiece has, where the beloved disciple has vacated his place, John the
Baptist. He stands, full of life, and quoting the scriptures as he points to
Christ. He is risen from the dead, and invisible to Jesus in agony. At John’s
feet is a lamb, with blood pouring from its breast into a chalice. The Baptist
is saying (from John 1) ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because
he was before me.”’
It is as
though the vindicated Baptist is saying ‘I told you so!’, and alongside the
picture of the most hideous, agonising and shameful death he is holding out an
eternal, resurrection hope to the dying
in the hospital. Indeed, another of the images of the altarpiece has an
unbelievably radiant image of the risen Christ, displaying is wounds, but
gloriously alive.
The Isenheim
altarpiece, unlike conventional images which try to portray the crucifixion as
it happened, shines, like John’s gospel, with the joy of knowing that,
even in the depths of the Good Friday agony, God’s Son will be vindicated. The risen
Baptist stands as a sign of hope for all the dying in the hospital. He embodies
the rejoicing of ‘Gaudete’ Sunday. And, as proof that those who did not know
the resurrection in their earthly lives, and equally saved by God.
In this
Advent season we rejoice in the hope coming into the world, the hope given to Israel
and treasured through long and difficult centuries, held secure through countless
setbacks. For it is the one God, creator and father of all, who planted this
message of hope, and it is the one we all worship .