Sermon - What did you come here to see?

“Visit Me” – illustration for Christianity Today magazine by Kumé Pather

A sermon given during Holy Communion at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Sunday 17th December 2023 (The Third Sunday in Advent) based on readings from  1 Corinthians 4.1-5 and Matthew 11.2-10.

Today we encounter John the Baptist once again. But this time the bewhiskered, wilderness-roaming prophet is cruelly constrained. Captive in Herod’s complex, probably not that far from the River Jordan where so many had flocked to see him.

And where, as the gospel writer reminds us a little earlier, John snapped at the Sadducees: “you snakes! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” 

A reference to John’s powerful prophecy of the coming Messiah. One who at the flick of a wrist will separate the wheat from the chaff – incinerating anything and anyone who fails to make the grade at the final judgement. John clearly had the Sadducees cards marked on that score. 

Insistent about the immanent arrival of this new regime, John didn’t hold back when it came to criticising the current leadership – particularly Herod’s new sleeping arrangements. Hence we find John sleeping in the clink. 

A prisoner. 

From his cell, we are told, John hears about the works of Christ. Healing the sick, raising the dead, blessing the poor. Exactly what Isaiah had prophesied centuries before. But not quite the fire and brimstone entrance of the Saviour that John seems to have had in mind. 

Our text this morning portrays John as a prisoner not just in a physical sense – but also as one held captive by doubt. A doubt that arises because in John’s judgement, Jesus doesn’t look like the Messiah he was expecting. He doesn’t fit the mould.

 

But was John aware of this double captivity?

 

 

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer compared life in a prison cell to the authentic experience of Advent. Prisoners, he claimed, are best placed to understand this season.

 
Like John the Baptist, Bonhoeffer spent considerable time as a captive. But unlike the Baptist, we know something of his experience through Bonhoeffer’s own words.

 

Prior to being transferred to a concentration camp - where he was executed just three weeks before VE day - Bonhoeffer was held for eighteen months in a prison in a northwest suburb of Berlin. 

His first few weeks in prison were difficult. He contemplated suicide. A fascinating document survives from that time – which embodies his ability to convey profound thoughts in a down to earth way. Bonhoeffer’s reflections on his first hours in captivity are written down on a shopping list. The only paper he had to hand. Between tobacco….matches…..a tin of pork fat - the provisions his father had brought to the prison for his son – Bonhoeffer’s ideas and half sentences speak out: 

 

“Separation from people, from work, the past, the future, from God….self-deception, idealisation…the emptiness of time..the significance of illusion.”

 

On this scrap of consciousness from his first days as a prisoner – we glimpse the shadows and self-doubts that Bonhoeffer later explored in poetry and letters smuggled out of prison.

“I often wonder who I really am” he wrote in one.

Conjecture, of course, but perhaps similar thoughts also went through the mind of the captive Baptist? While the gospel writer projects John’s doubt onto the identity of Jesus as Messiah; it is surely not too much of a leap to suppose that, like Bonhoeffer, John was also plagued by self-doubt. And furthermore - to suggest a correspondence between those two doubts?

In our reading today, and in the words of the Collect, we are reminded that John’s very being was intrinsically linked to that of Jesus. John was born to be his herald. So in doubting the identity of the Messiah would John not also be doubting his own? 

For Bonhoeffer, this crucial interrelationship between personal identity and that of our Saviour applies to all who have been baptised and – importantly – to all our relationships with each other. 

In his short book ‘Life Together’ he explains that it is only through Christ that we can know God. And it is only through Christ that we can truly know each other and know ourselves.

 

In order to understand why he thinks that, we need to appreciate what Bonhoeffer describes as the difference between human and divine love – as evidenced in the communities founded upon them.

 

A community based on human love, Bonhoeffer explained, might look like a church. Its members will have a strong desire to be together and may well be doing great things. Human love for one’s neighbour, he says, can often surpass divine love in terms of its visible results.

But without Christ at the centre of each relationship, human influence inevitably fills the gap. There’s always someone in control – with power over the other. Human love is ultimately coercive and dominating.

 

Communities based on human love do not truly serve others – even if they appear to be doing so. Because truly serving another requires a relationship founded in freedom not control. We cannot serve another unless we respect the freedom that God has given them to be the person He intends. Divine love is about embracing that freedom.

So, we can only truly know ourselves and one another through Christ because it is only through the salvation – the freedom – that he brings, that we can encounter that authentic self – the person that God made each of us to be. Knowledge of another without Christ is not true knowledge at all, but an imposition of human power – one persons will upon another. An attempt by us to play God – to make the other person fit into our mould, our image of them.

 

Human love even encourages us to play God over God! John the Baptist fell foul of that. Captive in doubt because Jesus didn’t seem to fit his image of the Messiah.

His example shows us how much pain is caused when we try to second-guess God’s will. But as St Paul reminds us – we know nothing – or rather, God knows everything – so leave the judging to Him. Two thousand years on and we’re still struggling with that one.

From the first moment one person meets another, Bonhoeffer says, they are making judgements. Looking for a strategic position that one can assume and hold over the other person. Comparing the other person to ourselves. Christ has brought peace between God and humanity – and between humans. So in meeting one another through Christ there is no possibility of human coercion or control. Meeting one another through Christ makes it possible to love our enemies. Something that human love can never achieve.

 

It is for this reason, Bonhoeffer explains, that the idea of unity through human love is an unattainable ideal. True community can exist only through the divine reality of relationships forged through Christ. St Paul describes the bearers of this divine reality as “stewards of the mysteries of God.”

 

Bonhoeffer says that when we meet in this way, it is an “occasion for joy” because we recognise in each other a physical sign of Gods grace. We see Christ in each other.

Is that what we see when we look around us?

Do we see God’s grace even in the face of our enemies – those with whom we are in conflict – those who irritate us? Are they even here – or have we curated our communities in our own image?

 

Three times in our gospel reading today, Jesus asks the crowd – what did you go out to see?

 

What is our answer to his question? What are we here to see?

 

 

Bonhoeffer suggested that the prisoner is best placed to see the meaning of Advent. 

“When God revealed himself to us in Christ”, he wrote, “this was the beginning of our instruction in divine love.”

But John the Baptist shows us that even in captivity embracing that divine love is difficult. Even for those of us whose personal identity has been bound, by the Spirit, to that of our Saviour.

Perhaps John couldn’t see the full nature of his imprisonment. His double captivity. That he was a captive not just physically but also a prisoner of the controlling, judgemental effects of his own human love.

 

Maybe what Bonhoeffer meant that it is only when we see how we are prisoners that we are best placed to embrace this season of Advent?

When we see that we are meeting each other in judgement. When realise we are failing to see each other as ‘occasions for joy’ – including those we find difficult to live with.

Is that what we’re here to see?

 

To see that we are prisoners of our own making.

Because it is only when we see that that we understand why the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. 

It is only then – when we are aware of our desperate need for this divine love – and how so often we fail to accept it – that we can be truly prepared for what is to come.

Let’s take a look at ourselves. Are we here to see that truth?

There’s only one who can judge. Our Messiah. Our Saviour.

Look around. Do you see Him?

Image: “Visit Me” – illustration for Christianity Today magazine by Kumé Pather