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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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Scripture citation(s): Luke 7:28-35
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 7:28-35
✛
Weeping and Dancing: John the Baptist and Jesus
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There are indications in the Gospels that the disciples of John the Baptist did not always “get” what Jesus did. Earlier in chapter 7 of Saint Luke, for instance, John sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask if he is the expected one who is to come, or if they should look for another. This is an odd question, and not easy to reconcile with what is said in the first chapter of Saint John’s Gospel, that right upon seeing Jesus John said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” whereupon his disciples immediately left him and followed Jesus. To me it seems reasonable to deduce that John the Baptist himself likely understood Jesus, but that not all of the people who followed him did. Thus, also in Saint John’s Gospel, we find John the Baptist explaining that he is not unhappy about Jesus’ presence and growing importance. “He must increase and I must decrease,” John says.
It may be that some outsiders tried to draw Jesus himself into this controversy, and something of that intrigue may lie behind this evening’s reading from Luke chapter 7. But Jesus always knows what is in the human heart, and he sees that these outsiders, this generation that is rejecting Jesus, is not really interested in the difference between him and John the Baptist. That’s the point of his little parable, the comparison of the men of this generation to children sitting in the market place and calling to one another, “We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.”
What we are to imagine here is a group of children who are saying to another group: no matter what we propose to do, you won’t join in with us. If we want to play “wedding,” you don’t join in the dance (we piped . . . and you did not dance). But if, on the other hand, we want to play “funeral,” you don’t join in that either (we wailed, and you did not weep). That this is a correct interpretation is shown by what Jesus goes on to say: For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine; and you say, “He has a demon.” The Son of man has come eating and drinking; and you say, “Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”
That is to say, whether with reference to Jesus, the Son of man, or to John, the men of this generation are like the children who won’t join in. They won’t join in with John, who is as it were “wailing,” with his abstemious life-style of self-denial and the call to repentance for sin. But neither will they join in with Jesus, who is as it were “piping” and “dancing,” with his dinner parties and wide-ranging friendships. They won’t join in with John, and they won’t join in with Jesus.
This, I think, is a serious and deeply sad spiritual state: pulling back from God, no matter what God does; pulling back from other people, no matter what they do or are. We’ve seen it before. Think of Jonah, pouting under the castor oil plant outside the walls of Ninevah, pouting because God has decided to spare Ninevah from destruction. The magnificent little book of Jonah ends with us not knowing how Jonah is going to respond: is he going to get over it and join in, or will he remain isolated, alone, and sullen? We’ve seen it also in Jesus’ teaching: think of how, in the parable of the prodigal son, after the wayward brother has returned and his father has embraced him and started a great celebration, the older brother hangs outside, clinging to his sense of righteousness, not willing to share in the celebration of the salvation of his brother. Jesus ends the parable with us not knowing what happens next. We are left pondering: will the elder brother relent and join the “piping” and “dancing,” or will he remain on the outside, alone?
What brings about this kind of change? How does someone move from being inert and refusing to join in with God—how does someone move from that posture of passivity to one of joining in with Jesus? One of God’s techniques in trying to lure us to turn to Jesus and “join in” is to make the gap between us and God smaller. He comes toward us. He has, in fact, been coming toward us since the time that our first parents turned away from him in their primal disobedience. We find that there are people to whom God spoke, as a way of preparing things: he spoke to Abraham, for instance. This is the overall story of the Old Testament. It was and always is very gradual: God moves us in small steps; there is one episode after another.
Which is to say: part of the mystery of how a person comes to God is that God prepares the way. This, it seems, is why John the Baptist was necessary. Jesus couldn’t just suddenly appear on the scene; we needed this other one to come first. Like Jesus, his birth was a miracle; like Jesus, he died at the hand of an earthly power. But in between he was unlike Jesus: he spoke the truth about our sinfulness; he lived a life of wild self-denial, eating, we are told, locusts and wild honey; he summoned us to repent so that we would be able to turn to Jesus when he came.
God invites us to “weep” in some circumstances, and in others to “dance.” God thereby makes his appeal to our heart. It is in small steps. One notices some feature of the sadness of the world, and one finds there are tears in the eye. One sees how someone, who had been wasting away in life, makes a turn away from that, and one discovers a willingness to rejoice for this other person. The heart moves us to engage with the sadness and the joy of the world. And God, as he moves our heart in those ways, is also moving towards us. Finally comes John the Baptist, to bring us to the crisis point of self-awareness (I have gone astray), and then he points to Jesus, who brings us home to his heart of joy.
Of course, turning to Jesus is not a matter of simple joy. John the Baptist shows that weeping is a necessary part of our common humanity. Jesus too wept when, at the end, he saw the city Jerusalem and contemplated the vast scope of human wickedness and loss. And Saint Paul admonished the Romans both to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep.
So, for now, God sometimes calls us to weep, sometimes to dance. These movements of our heart are ways to prepare us to join with him. Yet at the end, there will be no weeping. To adapt T. S. Eliot, there—there is only the dance.
