Rejoice (you son of a snake)
Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent - Gospel reading here
Now John certainly had a unique homiletic style. I’m just imagining what it would be like to start a Christening like he did. You know, the family in their Sunday best, trying their best to stop little Marmaduke or Esmerelda from crying all over the family baptismal gown, and I say my words of welcome to the congregation:
“You brood of vipers!”
Well, I can dream.
Not an easy man, John. Demanding. Austere. Probably not much fun at a party. And here we read, after he’s banged on about sandal straps and threshing-floors and burning chaff, that he also said “many other things” to - er - “exhort” the people. If the things he said in the Gospels are the edited highlights, I’d love to hear some of the out-takes.
But even with what little we’ve got, it would be pretty easy to see John the Baptist as an extremist: bearded leader of a band of desert fanatics in the Middle East, living off the land (locusts and honey), and where? - in a cave, maybe? Sound familiar?
You can see why he made people uncomfortable, and still does. He’s a bit, well, Old Testament - or at least, a bit Old Testament in the sense of the bits of the Old Testament that people who don’t really like the Old Testament tend to focus on. But I don’t think that’s fair to the Old Testament, or to S. John. Or, for that matter, to the Jews. And that’s something we Christians really need to be careful of, if we want to avoid repeating some of the ugliest episodes of our religion’s history.
In Advent, we stand with St John at the threshold between memory and hope: the memory of the past, and the hope of the future. The figure of John the Baptist is the type, the literary personification, of that liminal position. He is a sign that we find hope not by erasing our history, but by seeking God in and through it: through our collective memory.
For John, the memory of the past is the collective Jewish memory of the sages and prophets, kings and judges, mothers, queens and concubines who went before him and whose lives filled his holy scriptures, mediating the Word of God. For us, the memory of the past is more closely focussed on the birth of the Word of God in flesh to the Blessed Virgin Mary at Christmas. But even though Mary gave birth to a boy, and not a book, the Word manifest in both book and boy is one Word, from one God. There’s no “Old Testament God” to oppose to a “New Testament God.” The future hope that this Word heralds is the same hope for us as it was for John and for all his fellow Jews, before him and ever since.
We forget that at our peril – or worse, really, to the peril of the Jews, and we all know how that has worked out in history. I know that there’s a tendency to see the God of the Old Testament as some kind of primitive, angry father figure, and to see Jesus as somehow correcting this with his lamb-like mildness. You sometimes hear people say that the ancient Jews weren’t “ready” for Jesus yet. Well, I think that Christian sense of “progress” has a lot of bad things to answer for. It seems to me not entirely unrelated to the suggestion you read so often in the western media that Islam, for example, is “mediaeval,” where “mediaeval” is a cypher for out of date and barbaric.
Anyone who has read a bit of the history of western relations with Japan will know how that kind of mindset played out over here between the Meiji Restoration and the Second World War. If you haven’t, I can recommend Jolyon Baraka Thomas’ new book, Faking Liberties. I say a few things about it in my book, too. No time for the details today, but we’d be fools to block our ears from the echoes of that mindset which still resound here today. There’s an assumption, even now, that the latest western values are self-evidently the best, that our values are somehow universal and not culturally specific, that our own historical predecessors were barbaric brutes, and any non-western peoples who don’t subscribe to what we do just need to grow up and catch up a bit.
But that is not the Gospel. If we think that Christ came to overturn the Old Testament, to redraft God’s promise to his people, then we are not listening to Jesus closely enough. A lot of his words were just as austere and demanding as John’s, or any Old Testament prophet. Our Lord was fond of citing Isaiah, not a prophet famed for his cuddliness. And, remember, He said quite explicitly that He had come not to change a “jot or tittle” of the Law, but rather to perfect it.
Now that is my fundamental theological principle, which my beloved Eastern Father the Pseudo-Dionysius encapsulated, and St Thomas Aquinas later borrowed and expanded on:
“Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.”
S Thomas Aquinas
When Our Lord visited his cousin John, he didn’t erase the Word of God that lay latent in everything John already knew from his Jewish tradition. He didn’t erase what was there, reformat the harddrive, as it were. Rather, he dug deeper into the memory; to switch metaphors, he dipped his net into the ocean of the collective Jewish mind, and drew out the best of sparkling, glorious fish that had been swimming around in there to bring them into new light.
And that’s what I mean about memory and hope. When John saw Jesus, memories came flooding back that were always there, but he never even knew he had. Memories of God. Knowledge not imposed from without, but dredged up from the inner reaches of his heart. And with those memories, the ancient hope seemed suddenly so bright and new.
The same Word God whom John knew in Scripture was born as a baby. This is the extraordinary claim that the Christian church makes. A baby, who already possessed the mind of God. The knowledge of everything. And yet, in that infant form, even as God’s Word was revealed, it was yet hidden. The fullness of that knowledge was hidden, it seems, even to Christ Himself. You could say, it was revealed as hidden. The treasure beyond all price, the pearl on the seabed, hidden in plain sight. And we are made in the same image. The knowledge of God is hidden within all of us.
“But so what?”, you might ask. And you’d be in good company, because that’s what the brood of vipers - I mean, congregation - asked John. So what that Abraham is our ancestor? - the memory. So what that one more powerful than you is coming? - the hope. And the answer remains the same now as then. Remember God by seeking His grace in nature. Look for God hiding in plain sight. Go into His hiding place, enter the clouds. Do the simple things we’ve forgotten. Share what you have. Be fair in your dealings. Whatever it is you do in life, find God there – and welcome Him, worship Him, turn to Him, adore Him. And you’ll see that salvation really is much nearer than you think. So near that you can touch It. At the altar today, you can hold salvation in your hands, as Mary held Him in hers. And more: you can taste salvation, you can recall the flavour of God hidden in your soul.
Remember: He has come to you.
Have hope: He will come to you again.
So rejoice! Gaudete!
(You brood of vipers).