Reflection by Frances Flatman for the 2nd Sunday of Advent:-
Advent is the time when we prepare for the coming of the Lord, the Saviour of the world, but there is a tendency for us to perceive this as goodies all round, as we anticipate the Christmas excesses. But this was not the way in which our scriptures thought. For them, as our Readings demonstrate, the looking forward to salvation was a challenging time; and it took Israel and the Church right back to their foundational moments, times of stress and discomfort, periods when they had to struggle to understand precisely who they were and what God wanted of them.
Ostensibly in our Reading from 1st Isaiah, (11:1-10) the 8th century BCE prophet of the Assyrian captivity, all appears to be calm and positive, a sort of Elysium in which everything is peaceful and calm in which the wicked will be punished and the poor cared for and no doubt the writer longed for such a time. Yet just a few lines later on we see a time of war and chaos in which the God of Israel will wreak havoc on other nations, as the mere ‘remnant’ of Israel is gathered from the nations in which they were dispersed as exiles. The picture drawn is troubling, and even the remnant are put through their paces and they enter a savage world of reform and reprisals. The picture in which ‘God is on our side’ is far from comforting, indeed deeply troubling, and with appalling consequences throughout history for detractors from a ‘pure Israel’ perspective.
In our Gospel (Matthew 3:1-12) we meet John the Baptist as he points to Christ, and we find that his message is one of radical reform and of the overthrow of much that the Temple Judaism of his time took for granted. Indeed, John quotes from 2nd Isaiah, prophet of the 6th century Babylonian Exile, the one who seeks a dramatically purged people, one forged by this experience and chastened who will lead the nation. Indeed, the whole picture we have of John, dressed in animal skins and feeding from the wild produce of the desert, locusts and wild honey, immediately throws us right back to the time of the Exodus and its foundation experience for Israel during those forty years in the desert travelling to the Promised Land; a journey of frequent failure on their part and a vivid learning experience. John’s message appears to be entirely focussed on ‘repentance’, self examination and reconstruction, and we note immediately that his ministry is deliberately removed from the capital Jerusalem with its Temple (here the second Temple only completed around the birth of Jesus under Herod the Great). To say that John was hostile to the Jewish authorities and religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, the latter entirely in charge of the Temple, and super rich as they controlled not simply its worship but its finances, is putting things mildly. ‘Brood of vipers, who warned you to fly from the retribution that is coming?’ He slams into their control, and the complacency by which they think themselves guardians of the faith given by Abraham, as though this will protect them despite their abuses. We are reminded of the prophet Elijah and his continual clashes with the king, and how he slaughtered the 400 prophets of Baal. John is a no holds barred man who just goes full tilt at those he believes to be the enemies of the true faith of Israel, the rich and powerful who exploit the poor and control and rule the faith of the people. His announcement of the nature of the ministry of Jesus would have been a shattering blow to the authorities, and we can perhaps understand why John died a martyr. But we meet John in this Gospel immediately after the Infancy Narrative in Matthew as he flings Jesus into the arena and kick-starts his ministry. We have to remember that Matthew wrote his story of Jesus as a great lament for the failure of Judaism to accept the Christ, the one they had awaited for centuries. Matthew saw the failure of the Jewish Revolt, which followed the crucifixion of Jesus by 30 years, as divine judgement on their whole long history, as the upshot was that the Christian faith left Judaism and spread out among the pagans. The Greek text makes the point even more starkly than the Jerusalem Bible, with John’s frightening picture of Jesus baptising with ‘the Holy Spirit and fire’; the one with his winnowing fan, the one who will, in Greek ‘thoroughly cleanse’ and burn the chaff. Clearly for Matthew there was to be an absolute divide between Judaism which rejected the messiah, and Christians, former Gentiles who accepted the faith.
However, Paul, writing to Christians in Rome in the late 50’s CE has rather a different perspective, and one which he had experienced from Jesus his master. For Paul speaks of toleration, or as the Greek has it ‘steadfastness and encouragement’. In Greek parakaleseos (comfort), repeated twice here. In the message of Jesus we do find more humour and compassion for the waywardness of humanity than is apparent in the radical thought of John the Baptist; and of course Paul the Pharisee was only too aware himself of the huge mind shift Christ worked in him, turning him from a persecutor of Christians to one of its major apologists. We see this shift to a more understanding valuation in Paul’s work on the Jewish Law, where originally he was adamant that the law had absolutely no place in Christian belief as grace alone was significant, yet by the time of writing Romans he can concede that the law has a place in pointing out human sins. The fact that in our passage he can be seen working as a pastor, amidst crowds of frequently rather volatile men and women, as we find in Corinthians; and even in Rome itself and the Rome of Nero at that when believers were having a very hard time, and Paul was concerned for their survival as a community rather than martyrdom, is significant. It was for the coming together, the welfare of both Christian Jews and pagan converts that he writes this letter. ‘It can only be to God’s glory, then, for you to treat each other in the same friendly way as Christ treated you. The reason Christ became the servant of circumcised Jews was not only so that God could faithfully carry out the promises made to the patriarchs, it was also to get the pagans to give glory to God for his mercy.’ The Greek puts it rather well, V6 ‘That together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ In Jesus, we see the patience of God himself, his infinite grace towards us all, and it was something that Paul had to learn as he worked among the unruly converts of Greece and Turkey. Perhaps that’s the message of this Advent, a willingness to espouse toleration, to become paracletes to one another, people of comfort towards others in a world so lacking in toleration.
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