Comforting God’s People
7 December 2008
This University only ever sees the tip of the iceberg of Advent: and sometimes not even that. When Michaelmas Term ends on the Solemnity of Christ the King, there are in some of the more liturgically progressive, or illiterate, colleges, services for the Solemnity, or “Stir up Sunday” for those following another dispensation, or for Advent, or for Christmas, or for all of them at once. And all followed by a festive turkey dinner and plum pudding. This House, however, cannot on this occasion, perhaps uniquely, take a holier-than-thou attitude because we usually only manage at most two Sundays of Advent with a High Mass and sermon; and we close for Christmas. But we recognise that to be, although unavoidable, an impoverishment. The Chapter consoles itself by realising that this congregation, at least, will continue to observe a holy Advent and to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ wherever they have dispersed. The Pusey House diaspora will be gathered to worship the new born child around their several altars, united in adoration if divided by geography.
Even if our solemn keeping of Advent is attenuated, the themes of longing and expectation remain predominant and properly potent for us. The theme of expectation may have particular currency as we wait in heart and mind for the coming of Our Lord’s Nativity, but it is a theme that the Church urges on us not merely in this season. It is an essential component of the Christian life. Even two thousand years since the first Christmas Day came and went, we must still be looking forward, still making our pilgrimage to the manger-throne of Bethlehem, still following the star so that we can see this thing that has come to pass, see the light of the world. This sense of longing and expectation in Advent assumes a greater degree of urgency in the days immediately before Christmas, there is a gathering of pace, a quickening of senses that is articulated in one of the Church’s liturgical treasures, one of the few treasures that we do not enjoy in our public worship here – the Great O Antiphons of Advent. Let me commend them to you.
From the 17th December they form the antiphons to the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. As the great feast of the Nativity of Our Lord draws ever closer, they address him under a series of titles that were given to him by the prophets of the Old Covenant before the world was saved. O Sapienta, O Adonai, O Radix Jesse, from the root of Jesse, the royal Davidic line, O Clavis David, “the providentially designed instrument which fits into the lock of our sad human experience … to give freedom to all our inhibited aspirations,” O Oriens, the Morning Star which lights up the world and our lives, O Rex Gentium, and finally, O Emmanuel, God with us, God with us destined to save us and to redeem us. In these antiphons, the poetry of Advent does no more than voice our human longing: a longing that the truth will set us free, will deliver us from the constraints of our fallen humanity, will shine his light to show us the path of holiness, will work out in us the purposes of the Incarnation, will let us emulate John Baptist, that Christ will increase in us and that as he increases, so our pride and wilful disobedience will decrease.
These are profound longings of the human condition, and they have been present since the first days. They are seen in our readings this morning which are cast in the language of the eschaton, the end of all things, the end times, the passing of the world, a time of cosmic upheaval. This does no more than reflect the expectation of the early Church.
The early Christians looked to the early, the imminent Second Coming of Our Lord. They looked forward to it eagerly because they were persecuted and oppressed and wanted to be caught up in the everlasting life of Christ. But they also looked forward with some anxiety as it was to them a real and imminent possibility. Eager and anxious anticipation is common enough for us all to have experienced it. However, we do not feel now as they felt then. We configure the past as comfortingly different from the present, pretend that we are more sophisticated, less primitive. We demean the experience of the past. We are now rather complacent Christians. Of course, we whinge about secularisation and our marginalisation in public discourse and polity but even with the threat of global warming, financial and economic collapse, and all the other potentials for doom that over-hang this hapless world, we do not live in expectation of a final catastrophe just around the corner.
When, for example, we pray “Thy kingdom come,” we do not do so in the expectation, or with the wish, that the world will end when we finish the prayer, or at the end of the week. Rather, we look forward to a time when the world as we know and experience it, will give way to something better, and we will have been caught up in the everlasting life and spirit of Christ, a place where peace and justice – those easy clichés of our prayer life – will be consummated.
But Advent should point us to something more urgent, something more compelling, something that renews the message of the Incarnation and the Nativity. A world groaning in its agonies and anxieties is in urgent and compelling need of rescue from its darkness. Christ, we know, is that light, “the light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John Baptist points us to that light. John “came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.”
John Baptist may not seem the most accessible or congenial of role models. Certainly his sartorial taste leaves much to be desired, no Ede and Ravenscroft or Boden, although his diet of locusts and wild honey strikes a peculiarly contemporary culinary note and would be unexceptional at “The Fat Duck” in Bray. Despite those drawbacks, John Baptist is a pivotal figure. Look at the bosses in the roof of this Chapel. Above us is a series of Old Testament prophets: in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel beyond the screen are the four Evangelists: and above the screen, the intersection of the old and new covenants, is John Baptist.
He emerged from the wilderness like many an Old Testament prophet to challenge the age and the generation which had fallen away from the old covenant and he preached a gospel of repentance. But he brought the first intimation of the coming of the new covenant in Christ. The Church needs that prophetic voice to challenge the present age, to stand out against a society that has lost its moral centre and its sense of God. It is not an easy, nor a palatable message. It opened John Baptist to risk and it opens us to risk, the risk of being ignored, the risk of being exposed to ridicule. But we know that love involves risk and in his love for mankind Christ risked all.
When God condescended to enter so intimately into our condition, he risked rejection. He did not arrive with a mighty army to conquer and bludgeon us into submission. He did not arrive in glory and majesty, arrayed in costly apparel. He humbled himself to be born in a manger, in a stable, in an outhouse, wrapped in swaddling clothes, not ermine, surrounded by the poor and lowly of creation. By defying expectations, by turning preconceptions upside-down, he began a reign like no other king. Once Christmas Day had happened, the world could never be the same again. However much the world may close its eyes to the revelation and stop its ears against his words, it does not make that revelation and those words any less true or necessary. A human nature wounded by the Fall will continue in some shadow: there were shadows as well as light in the stable at Bethlehem: there was darkness on Calvary. However ugly the world is, however impatient, cruel, angry or acquisitive and self-regarding mankind is, they are overshadowed by the redemption of the cross. The light Christ shines allows us to see the faults, follies and disfigurements that we have perpetrated. The child in the manger and the man on the cross shame us in our indifference. The poverty of the manger and the dereliction of the cross challenge our self-satisfaction and moral lapses, our failure to love. The humility of the manger and the humiliation of the cross are reproaches to our pride and vain-glory. The innocence of the manger and the spotless sacrifice of the cross reproves our lapses into sin. The Atonement is the primary purpose of the Incarnation; the road that begins at Bethlehem leads to Calvary.
John Baptist prepared the way for the Saviour of the world. When his task was over, his work done, he suffered the martyrdom of decollation. He did not live to see the consummation of his prophesy in his cousin’s crucifixion. But had he been on Calvary’s hill his message would have been the same. In his great and terrible painting of the Isenheim Altar-piece, Grünewald had that perception and insight. It is a horrifying painting. It is a cruel death depicted without disguise, amelioration or softening in its grotesque terror. The wood of the cross is rough, cheap, ugly, crudely constructed. On the cross the body of the Crucified, the dying man, juts forward. His body is a sickly green, as if afflicted with the corruption and decay of the world. His fingers are gnarled and twisted in grasping claws, straining and taut with pain. This Christ is frightening, a dying man clutching at you, reaching desperately for help that never comes.
Our Lord dies in an empty landscape, a desert place, engulfed in a lightless light, a depressing, dreary, dark void. His rotting flesh is covered in red sores, perforated and running with blood and sweat. It shocks us and brings vividly face to face with the reality of what innocence suffered for us. It is not an easy victory. It warns us that Faith is not easy, it is demanding and wrenching. In Grünewald’s unrelenting vision, it is violent and extreme.
At the foot of the cross is a pleading Mary Magdalen, Our Lady swooning with grief and held in the arms of the Beloved Disiciple, and S. John Baptist: “The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease” It is John’s response when questioned by those seeking to force a wedge between Jesus and John. It was a similar temptation offered to Adam and Eve by the beguiling serpent: the temptation to throw off their identity as the image of God in order to be God. The tragedy of this sin, which applies to us as much as to them, is that seeking to be more than the image of God does not lead to greater or more fulfilled life. It leads to death. The greatest possible life for Adam and Eve was not to know good from evil but was to continue to grow into infinite, never-ending fellowship with God and fulfill their greatest possible destiny. John Baptist is tempted in the same way. Rather than being the forerunner, the one who prepares the way but does not live to see its fulfillment, he is effectively urged to usurp Jesus, to become the central character in God’s narrative of salvation. But John knows this to be a perversion of the purposes of God, seeks to be no more than to be the Friend and Forerunner of the Bridegroom, Jesus. He is freed from feeble pursuits of self in order to be the one whose life points not to himself but to Christ. It is in losing his life by pointing to Christ that John’s life is truly and completely realized “For this reason my joy has been fulfilled,” he says.
As the Body of Christ our lives are to be like John Baptist who points the world to Christ; to the Christ who through us offers faith where the world can only offer fear, hope where the world offers only death and despair, and love where the world only offers unforgiving violence. We must decrease so that he can increase. We must purify ourselves, even as he is pure; so that when he shall appear again with power and great glory, we may be made like unto him in his eternal and glorious kingdom.
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library