Advent 3
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 16th December, 2007
In our Advent Group we have been looking at a variety of very different poems by poets old and new. On Tuesday we began by looking at a poem called Names by Wendy Cope, written about her own grandmother.
Many of us were moved by this poem. Some of us found it frightening, some reassuring. Some found it tender, some very stark. But what the poem did, with its focus on the names we can have through life, was open up to us some reflections on who we are as our lives progress, where our identity is in the roles we take on, the roles we are given, the perceptions people have of us, the perceptions we have of ourselves – in all this, the still persistent question: where is the bit of me that stays throughout all these changes and fluctuations? Is the continuity what we call the soul?
My guess is that as John the Baptist lay in his prison cell something of the cell´s darkness had invaded and possessed his soul. He had been so assured, a preacher, a man so certain that this Jesus was the one expected – and now, he questions his own judgement, he questions whether he had got it all wrong, and wasted his life to die unloved and laughed at. He hears what Jesus is saying and doing and its not what he expected – where´s the radical power, the booting out of the Romans, the takeover of the world by God´s messiah? As he lies in his cell, you can forgive his impatience and frustration. He sends word, we are told, �Look, are you the one who is to come or are we to wait, are we to start looking for soneone else?�
As we wait here in Advent, and think of John´s confused expectations, we can ask a question too: just whose birth are we about to celebrate anyway? Is it someone who looks, thinks, sounds just like us? Are we celebrating the birth of a genial Jesus? Someone who stands for what we stand for? Is it Jesus we are actually wrapping up at Christmas, packing him up into a small bundle that we can handle, with no challenge, no questions, no judgement at all as to who we are, who we have become, what we think, how we behave, how we treat each other, how we ignore things we could actually help change? We have this image of Christmas of everyone looking at the baby Jesus in the crib, this season of Advent first says, well, before we do that, lets look at you and whilst we are at it, lets look at what you will this baby into, what names, roles, and pigeon holes you will reduce him, swaddle him, with.
When John sent off his question, Jesus sent him reply: Go and tell John what you see and hear: what was dead is now raised, what was blind now sees, what was lame now walks, what was unclean is now embraced, and the poor have good news at last. Jesus, in other words, doesn´t try and give a clear argument as to why John was right. He gives him back a vision, the vision, the vision of life as lived when hearts are changed by God, the only vision that you are I come here each week to be charged with, enthused with, inspirited by, entrusted with. He does this by telling him of his own merciful ministry to the marginalised. Not too long ago I preached about the former dean of Westminster Abbey, Michael Mayne, and his diary that he wrote as he lived his final weeks with cancer. I end with an extract from 19th August 2005:
We do see Jesus as we want to see him. All my ministry I have taken the soft approach, played down sin and judgement, played up mercy and compassion, seen the essence of Jesus’ ministry as affirming individuals, not exclusing them, see the Kingdom as elusive and full of surprises. Ironically, when I retired from the Abbey, one of my gifts was an icon, painted by Sergei Fedorov, the young Russian icon-maker who produced the fine icons we commissioned which so transformed the Abbey nave. When my icon arrived it was a stern, unsmiling Christ in dark colours, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere above my head. I suspect I needed that bit of balance and soon grew to value it, even if at times like the present I yearn for a more tender gaze. (Perhaps that’s my strange, fatherless, rather lonely childhood speaking). For I realise that my icon suggests the Gethsemane Christ, the one who shares the suffering. That’s the Christ I need now. One who, being human, was tempted in that garden to turn back from the inevitable outcome, but held true to his vocation.
Each one of us is frail and vulnerable; too often we are to be discovered sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, or lying in a hospital bed or on a psychiatrist’s couch, crying out for healing. Crying out to be seen, not chiefly as a set of interesting symptoms or a machine requiring repair, but as a person, with all that word implies. Twice in my life I have been knocked flat, trapped by illness and wonderfully diminished. But that reality conjures up the dominant story in the Christian life, its great redeeming truth: that of the wounded healer (Eliot’s ‘wounded surgeon’); the one made incarnate and laid low, sharing our vulnerability, our encounter with mystery, our Job-like search for answers; the one who encounters our mystery and himself enters into our troubled questions. And in this light, we are helped to see light; and to endure.
Perhaps we need to prepare ourselves a little better for that visit to the stable?
