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The Rev. David Curry: “Behold the Lamb of God”
by Scott Gilbreath ~ December 21st, 2008
The Rev David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, Windsor, gave this sermon this morning for the Fourth Sunday In Advent, based on the Gospel reading (St John 1:19-28).
The theme of Advent is holy watching and holy waiting; that presents a challenge because it’s very hard to wait upon God. Advent is also a time of questioning. Fr Curry ponders the questions asked by two witnesses of Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Thomas. As he quoted Thomas Aquinas, “The doubting of Thomas brings us the greatest certainty”, I understood for the first time why the Feast Day of St Thomas occurs during Advent.
“Behold, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world”
We have come full circle, it may seem. Today’s Gospel ends with where we began on The Sunday Next Before Advent, itself a day of endings and beginnings. In a way, Advent, by which I mean both the season and the doctrine, captures the whole of our lives in faith.
It signals the coming of God towards us. That is the first note. It signals as well the heightened awareness on our part about the coming of God towards us. That is the second note. Advent is simply and entirely holy waiting and holy watching, our watching and our waiting upon God, upon the God who comes to us with grace and salvation, the one who comes “with healing in his wings,” as Malachi puts it. He comes with forgiveness. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
Such is our beginning and our ending to which this day and week of the deepest darkness of night would bring us. It would bring us to Christ, the Lamb of God, the Word and Son of the Father who comes to us as the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world whose birth marks the beginning of the way of sacrificial love for us and in us.
We can only watch and wait. It is the hardest thing for us, I fear, and yet, as always, the hardest things are the things most worth doing. We watch and wait upon God. There is our heightened awareness, our heightened expectancy, all of which are concentrated for us on this day. We wait in the circle of light, the circle of our watching, which brings us to the light of salvation and glory, the light of God with us, our Emmanuel, Christ the true and only light.
But what makes watching and waiting so hard? Because it is a watching and a waiting upon God. Without that all our advent preparations for Christmas are but tinsel and wrap, sounding brass and clanging cymbal, empty show and vain illusion. We are, I fear, too much with ourselves and not enough with God.
There is nothing so hard as watching and waiting upon God, and nothing more necessary. It is an activity of the highest order. It is anything but passivity, as if we were mere accidents waiting to happen. No. The challenge of Advent is a peculiarly modern challenge, the challenge not to be defined just by “what has happened to me.” The challenge is to rise above the comfortable but, ultimately, demeaning culture of victimhood. The challenge is to put aside the endless whine of ‘what about me?’ The challenge is to find ourselves in the story, in the advent of the Word.
I know; it is hard. It is hard to watch and wait because we get so caught up in our own concerns. They are very real, of course. It is hard because there are hardships and heart-aches, sorrows and sadnesses. There are the struggles and pains of the break-up of families and marriages; there are the worries of parents about their children; there are the anxieties of the aged in the face of death and dying. And yet, these are the realities that the Advent Word of God addresses.
There is no joy simply in our worries and anxieties and no advent because we will not watch and wait upon God. And yet, to do so is to wait upon what ennobles and dignifies our humanity, upon what raises up and restores us; in short, upon what actually occasions rejoicing. It is all the note of this day.
This day of watching and waiting upon God signals, in a nutshell, the whole of our lives in faith. We wait upon God. We come to him for light knowing only too well all the forms of our darkness. This waiting is the highest activity of our souls. We can do no more and, yet, it is all his doing in us in prayer and praise, in watching and waiting upon God. But in so doing we shall find our “rejoicing in the Lord,” as the Epistle so wonderfully reminds us.
This is not the naïveté of wishful thinking. In this watching and waiting there is the holy questioning which gives us, at the very least, a framework of understanding about the one who comes. Last week we had occasion to consider two figures of the spiritual landscape of Advent, namely, Mary and John the Baptist. And of course, the witness of John the Baptist is directly before us today. But consider for a moment, Mary and Thomas and their interrelation in the context of holy questioning. Thomas, sometimes called “doubting Thomas”, is also a figure of the Advent, and in a most instructive way.
Mary asks “how shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Her question expresses the great wonder and miracle of grace, namely, that God wills to be man through woman (to redeem both sexes, incidently, as one Anglican divine observed). By the necessity of salvation, this is something beyond the ordinary course of human life. Her question and ensuing response to the Angelic messenger ushers us into an understanding of the wonder of it all.
Thomas, too, on the darkest and the longest night of all, questions the reality of the Risen Christ. It may seem to be an Easter story, and it is, but his feast day is actually in Advent, on Dec. 21st. It being a Sunday this year, it is transferred to Tuesday. In his commemoration, however, we see the deep interplay of Advent and Lent, of Christmas and Easter. As another Thomas puts it, the great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, “the doubting of Thomas brings us the greatest certainty.” How wonderful that through doubt we arrive at a kind of certainty! It is, as if the two Thomas’ anticipate Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, whose method of doubt leads to an inquiry into what can be known indubitably.
The apostle Thomas simply wants to know the truth of the God made man, to know for himself that the one who has come and whom he has followed throughout the dust of Palestine, the one who has said “I am the truth and the life,” is indeed the living truth who has overcome the darkness of death. His questioning is not the negative doubting of our comfortable, arrogant and false skepticisms, the doubting which asserts the denial of the possibility of knowing anything at all. No. His questioning opens him and us to the wonder of it all, the wonder of “My Lord, and My God.” In a way, his words capture our sense of wonder at the birth of Christ. We shall behold the babe lying in the manger and cry out “My Lord and My God.” Such motions of divine grace are also there for us in the devotional approach to the sacrament. “My Lord and My God!”
“Be not faithless but believing,” Jesus says to Thomas. “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the most high overshadow thee”… “Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,” the Angel Gabriel says to Mary. Their questions open us out to the light of the one who comes, if only we will watch and wait in the mode of holy questioning.
The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on this day in the barrage of questions which belong to “the witness of John.” “Who are thou?” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask him in a kind of genuine puzzlement. “What do you say about yourself?” He turns their questions about himself into a witness to the one who comes. “This is the witness of John.” John has learned through questioning, too, it seems. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” he had asked and was given, if not an answer, at least a way of understanding about prophecy fulfilled and about the nature of true human desiring.
In the logic of Advent, we have come full circle. We come to him whom John points out, “Behold the lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” And in him is all our rejoicing.
Amen.
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