I've been thinking and preparing for over a week now, for Sunday, November twenty seventh! Advent Sunday. I’ve been turning to the reading the passages of scripture
that introduce the events described in the four Gospels. For the first time I can remember, giving
deep attention to what the angle spoke to Elizabeth before her baby was born. What an awesome experience that must have
been! He told her that her son’s name
would be John. That he would be for the world a herald of the Messiah who was
coming. Saint Luke records this in his first chapter: “He will go on
before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah,” the angel told her.
And that’s exactly what happened some thirty years later.
The New Testament writers report that John called all who would hear to repent
and believe just as God’s angle had promised his
mother, John would do. He was sent to
prepare the way for the coming Lord, to prepare hearts to recognize God
among them. “Many of the people of
Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God,” proclaimed the angel. This John did and continues to do.
As I ponder, it seems a little odd to me that this untamed,
locust-eating figure of John the
Baptist is one of the key figures in celebrating the Christmas season.
His wild and probing message continues to cry in urgency, “Are you ready,” and for this, despite the sentimental and
domesticated visions of Christmas common to at least, my era, is a cry worthy of
the bizarre and jolting doctrine of Incarnation. In fact, I am stopped in my
tracks, right here, right now, and asked, “Bill, are you ready to respond to the
fragile infant that came into the world through a manger in Bethlehem? Are you
ready to hear him, see him, consume his flesh and blood? Are you ready to
recognize God in body, the
hunter, the king, the great I AM?” Isn’t the testimony of
John essentially tame compared to the mystery of an incarnate God?
St. John in his first chapter and repeats often the Baptists’ insistence: “I am not the Christ, but truly and
fearfully, there is one who is.”
I’m reminded again, the Incarnation, this embodied presence
of God, bids me not only to remember God’s descent into a dirty stable in
Bethlehem, but to keep myself awake to the reality of God’s descending upon the
thresholds of my life. As John called the people of Israel, so the Incarnation
continues to sound the consequence of this mystery: Keep yourself clothed in
readiness, for God is near.
I am unable to explain a spiritual chill. But I get one when I recognize even John, who
was the first to recognize Jesus for who he was, leaping in his own mother’s
womb at the arrival of the pregnant Mary, struggled through dark and confusing
times, wondering perhaps if God was indeed near. Thrown in jail by Herod,
John’s certainty, seems to me, to be challenged for the first time. I can attest to likewise
seeing a fog coming over the “Go and ask Jesus,” John told his disciples, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”message of light I’ve preached so confidently. “If
this man is who I thought he was, why am I in this place?”
With John in mind, I turn back to some of my underlining of
what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once
compared our waiting on God to the waiting that is
done in a prison cell, “in which one
waits and hopes and does various unessential things… but is completely
dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the
outside.” It is a dramatic metaphor, particularly from one who stood
imprisoned himself, chained for standing up to the Nazi’s, waiting for them to
deal with him as they would. Bonhoeffer saw clearly something I have forgotten
many times in the midst of a sentimental holiday: the Incarnation is about God
breaking through the door that I myself cannot open. And in fact, all year
round, the Incarnation is my promise that God will come breaking through once
again.
I have always wondered if Jesus’s response
to John’s question frustrated the prophet behind bars or if it is my own frustration
so easily read into his words. Jesus didn’t offer a clear and certain answer
for the alone and imprisoned baptizer, but invited John to answer his own
question in Matthew 11:4-6. “Go back and report to John what you hear
and see,” Jesus told John’s
disciples. “The blind receive
sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead
are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who
does not fall away on account of me.” I can’t find a response given from
John. O’ I wish I could. What matters today is my response; isn't it?
Sitting within his quiet cell, perhaps, just perhaps, John
began to recount the conversations he had with Jesus. I wonder,
perhaps, hearing again the words God had placed on his own lips. “He who is mightier than I is coming, the
strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the
Holy Spirit and with fire:” as St. Luke records in his third chapter.
No comments:
Post a Comment