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The Second Sunday Of Advent
Merciful God, who sent thy messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the HolySpirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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The Second Sunday Of Advent
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A Sermon by
Fr. Daniels
✛
Soon and Very Soon
In the Old Testament, the last twelve books are known as the minor prophets: Hosea and Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and the others. We call them “minor” prophets not because they are unimportant—they aren’t the farm team for the major league other prophets—but because they’re shorter than the others. Were you to sit down this afternoon and open your Bible to the book of Isaiah, for example, one of the major league prophets, you’d be sitting there for quite a while before you got to its graphic conclusion. Isaiah has sixty-six chapters in our Bibles and covers a lot of ground.
You would not have as much trouble, however, with Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament. Malachi is only four chapters long in our bibles. You could probably read through it easily in the time it takes me to finish this sermon (though I would prefer that you did not).
Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament, the final word, as it were, but it serves less as a conclusion than as a cliffhanger, announcing that the Day of the Lord is fast approaching. “Behold, the day is coming,” Malachi says, the day of the Lord is coming, and you will know when that day is here, the Lord says, because “I will send you Elijah the prophet” (4:5). Elijah, that great prophet of God from about another 400 years before Malachi’s own day, he will be the indication that the day of the Lord is at hand. So get ready. And with that the Hebrew Testament ends, the book is closed, and the waiting begins.
And they waited and they waited. For four hundred years they waited. Kingdoms rose and fell around them; generations were born and generations died. And still they waited, with prophetic silence.
Then, a word comes: Repent. After four hundred years, from out of the silence of the desert surrounding them, the people waiting in the city hear a cry and it says, Repent. The new Elijah has come. The day of the Lord has come.
He wasn’t hard to spot. Attired just as Elijah had been, in camel hair and leather (2 Kings 1:8), he lived in the desert, he preached, and then he baptized, because when John cried repent, the people repented. They were expecting Elijah, and by God there he was (Matthew 11:14, 17:12). The wait was over, and the voice cried, Repent, and repent they did.
That was a long time ago. At this point, he seems pretty far from our present concerns, and nowadays it’s hard to know what to do with John the Baptist, two thousand years later, in a world he couldn’t have imagined. One of the incongruities of this festive season is that there’s no way to get from late November to December 25 without going through the Baptizer. He is inseparable from the season itself: to get to Christmas you have to go through Advent, and to talk about Advent is to talk about that strange man, John the Baptist, of questionable relevance to our modern concerns. He was a fringe figure then and he is a fringe figure now, but at neither time is he peripheral to the action. He is right there at the center. All four of the gospel writers talk about John the Baptist before they talk about the ministry of Jesus. Even in Luke, to meet the baby Jesus you have to first meet the baby John the Baptist. To get to Jesus the Christ you have to go through John the Baptist.
And John the Baptist cries, Repent.
We may hear this as a discordant note at a joyful time. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The point of the repentance that John calls for is not the eradication of joy. The point of repentance is not to feel bad about ourselves or realize what a mess we are. To repent is not about feeling one way or another. To repent is to think differently about the world. To repent is to embrace the reality that the day of the Lord has arrived. Already. While we were busy busy busy with our oh-so-important demands of the day, and making our peace with the state of the world, the kingdom of God has come along and surprised us. The world is being changed and will be changed by Jesus the Christ.[1] The day of the Lord has come, and this is good news.
That may, indeed, make us feel differently. We know that this world is being changed and will be changed. The Lord has come and is coming, so we can have faith that the strong will not forever crush the weak; that the poor will not be forgotten; that in God’s time every tear will be wiped away. We know that Jesus Christ our Savior will redeem the world from its pervasive sin and rescue it from its love of death.
To know that the day of the Lord has come may indeed change our tune. To see the world differently may give us a new feeling. Because one consequence of repentance is hope. Repentance is not despair, not self-abasement, not even necessarily sadness. To repent is to have hope.
Hope is why the people from Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region round about the Jordan made that long walk—twenty miles or so into the wilderness—to see John the Baptist. They did not go just so they could feel bad about themselves. They went to John because the kingdom of God was at hand and that gave them joy and, yes, it gave them hope. They knew what the present world looked like; they saw its crises and its wars and rumors of wars; they saw their present darkness just as clearly as we see ours, and they knew just as clearly as we should that only the one who is the light of the world can dispel it.
There in Jerusalem, after a four hundred year wait, that light of the world was dawning over the eastern horizon. You could hardly see it. But soon and very soon its brightness would fill the earth;
and soon and very soon they were going to see the king,
and soon and very soon there would not be any more crying, and any more dying, because the day of the Lord is at hand, hallelujah,
soon and very soon, just as he said it would be, hallelujah.
The only ones in the gospel that John rebuked were the Pharisees and the Sadducees who believed that they did not have to think differently, that they were already prepared for the day of the Lord. They were the ones who received the prophetic vituperation, that withering attack (“brood of vipers”) that makes John’s voice a minority report in this time of wreaths and trees and tinsel. But that is why—not with the goal of making them feel bad about themselves, but because they were cutting themselves off from their own hope. Apart from redemption by God, there is no hope in the life of this world, not in its kings nor its utopias nor its things or therapies.
Saint Matthew makes that perfectly clear. What immediately precedes the arrival of John the Baptist in chapter three of this gospel is the slaughtering of the holy innocents by King Herod, the murder of all of the two-year-old children in Bethlehem. What comes before Jesus is John the Baptist, and what comes before John the Baptist is the murder of children. Repent. This is not about how we feel. Repent, he says. Soon and very soon.
They were filled with hope. They were filled with joy. From Jerusalem, and Judea, and the region round about Jordan, they left their homes to go see John. Let’s go out there with them, out to the wilderness, and let’s get ready.
Repent, everybody. It’s been a long time, but he’s coming. Repent: it looks dark out there, but the sun is going to rise. Be possessed by the fullness of hope, by the fullness of joy. Think differently about the world. Repent. Because soon and very soon, soon and very soon. Hallelujah, hallelujah.
_______________
[1] See Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew (Brazos, 2006), 45-49.
