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 .