Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:7-13
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80
If today feels a bit like Advent you aren’t having a
flashback, its intended to. The readings
are full of the expectation inherent in the Advent season, with Isaiah’s
prophecy of comfort for God’s people and Paul’s re-telling of salvation history
up to point of Jesus’ ministry. Moreover,
almost as if to stress the reference, the Church has appointed the preface of
Advent to be used in the Eucharistic prayer – listen for it as we come to consecrate
the bread and wine, the celestial meal of the coming kingdom. You see today the Church commemorates the
birth of John the Baptist. If you
remember at the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel visits Mary, inviting her
into the process of salvation by becoming the mother Christ, he says to her, “And now, your
relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the
sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
(Luke 1:36-37) So, you do the math –
it’s six months until Christmas.
The figure of John the Baptist in the Christian tradition
is that of fore-runner and so the Advent resonances are fitting. In the Gospels John is identified as voice mentioned
in the book of Isaiah crying out in the wilderness: “prepare the way of the
Lord”. (Isaiah 40:3) John is in the type
of the Hebrew prophet, some of whom lived in the wilderness and called for a
radical return among their fellow Jews to the covenant principles. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus identifies
John with Elijah – or at least the office of Elijah: “For all the prophets and
the law prophesied until John came; and if you are willing to accept it, he is
Elijah who is to come. Let anyone with
ears listen.” (Matthew 11:13-15) For,
according to a prophecy in Malachi – “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah
before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” (Malachi 4:5) – many Jews
believed Elijah’s return would signal the coming of the end of the age an the
arrival of the Messiah.
Certainly then, for the earliest Christians, John’s ministry
of witness and his call to repentance marked the beginning of the end of the
waiting, and it is in undertaking this
work that John makes his first appearance in most of the Gospels. At the same time he marks the continuance of
the prophetic tradition of Israel – he looks, talks and acts like the prophets
of old. And if you don’t get it, there
is that verse from Isaiah I already mentioned to make the whole thing clear: “A
voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight
in the desert a highway for our God.’ ” (Isaiah 40:3) At the same time, Luke in his recording of
John’s conception seeks to deepen that sense of continuance. Before even John is cast in the type of the
ancient prophets, his parents and his birth are already cast in type of other
figures from the Jewish tradition – the elderly couple hoping for a child, the
dedicated and faithful priest. Elizabeth
is in the pattern of Sarah and Hannah who remained true to the promises of God
and who in their old age the Lord visited with longed-for children. Zechariah is in the cast of figures like Eli
and even Abraham who faithfully submitted themselves to God’s holiness, serving
God at his altars and in the world while waiting for the full manifestation of
the divine glory. So, Luke is trying to
place the birth of Jesus within a wider context, a more human context; and
while Matthew does this in large part by a long list of genealogy (cf. Matthew 1:1-17) – look at the first
chapter of Matthew when you get chance – Luke does it with character and
narrative, with people and stories. Both
are trying to place the Jesus event within the story of Israel. Luke, we can safely say, does it more
graphically, appealing to the emotions and imagination of the reader or hearer.
Nothing comes from nothing, and all things – even new
things – need a context in which they can be grasped or understood. I was recently speaking with someone who
wondered if the traditions of the Church might get in the way of his
relationship with God, his understanding of the Gospel. I mentioned that the fact we can speak about
God in the ways that we do, or that we have the Bible in its present form, is
on account of the Church who through
the centuries tested, debated, experienced and reasoned the truths of the
faith. That we can speak about the
Trinity – about a triune God, or that we can speak about the mystery of Jesus’
being fully divine and fully human are thanks to Church down the ages. Even aspects of the our social and political
lives such as the equality of all persons – no matter how imperfectly we may
put it into action – comes the Church’s discernment of the Incarnation and
thus the dignity of every human person. In
the same way, the people of 1st century Palestine were able to
see a prophet in John the Baptist, because they knew the traditions of Judaism,
because they had a context for the work of a prophet. The early Christians who read or listened to
the Gospel of Luke experienced the connections between their past – the history
and traditions of Judaism – and the new or the present reality of the Jesus
event. Indeed, they would not have been
able to speak about Jesus in the ways they did – titles like Lord and Messiah –
without the inherited traditions of Israel.
The advent language attendant on today’s feast reminds us
that John the Baptist marks the beginning of something new, something which has
been longed for and waited for. At the
same time the way in which Luke tells the story – and hence the way in which the
Church tells the story – points to this new thing’s connections with the past;
and that to understand anything new we need a place from which to stand to view
it and make sense of it. We need a
context. My Latin teacher once reminded
our class of the maxim Nihil novum sub
sole – “There is nothing new under the sun”. Perhaps that isn’t exactly true, but anything
new does need a past, something “old”, as it were, in order for us to have any
context in which to understand it. A balance
must be struck between the two; and the figure of John the Baptist, the stories
surrounding his birth, the resonances he elicits of the traditions of Israel
help remind of this truth. We always
stand in that place between what has been and what is coming. If we live too much in the former we never
come into anything that is new, we may miss the developing truth of our lives
and quite possible of God’s plans.
However, if we try to live only in the latter we have no grounding, we
try to live in an impossibility. Like
John the fore-runner who clearly stands as the bridge between the old and the
new, so are we all called to do – to stand in that place where we can discern a
new future by making sense of the past, where we can live into what God is
doing by being aware of what God has done.
It can be a difficult place in which to stand, the temptation being
always to live in only one or the other.
Again, we find the deepest truth to be revealed not in either/or
thinking, but in both/and living where opposites are in resolved in the
ineffable reality of God and where past, present and future meet in the fullness
of eternity.
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