8am & 11am, Sunday 8th December

Isaiah 35.1-10

James 5.7-10

Matthew 11.2-11

After the great rejoicing of the Christmas Fair yesterday, we have the joy this morning of Gaudete Sunday – a time to let our hair down, to lighten our candle colour and to recognise that Jesus Christ is coming soon.  As Pope Francis put it in a homily on this day, on this ‘Sunday of joy’, we have a chance to ‘stop fretting about all [we] still haven’t done to prepare for Christmas’, and instead to ‘think about all the good things life has given [us]’

You might not think that John the Baptist is a natural companion for our rose-coloured rejoicing.  As we heard last week, his appearance was odd, his habits were odd, and his social graces were…well…nil.  And if you combine swarthiness with an abrupt manner, you’re running the risk of being thrown into prison – at least if the ruler at the time is Herod.  Mark tells us that John the Baptist was imprisoned for speaking out when Herod had an affair with his own brother’s wife.  The historian, Josephus, has it that he was imprisoned because Herod feared that he was getting too popular.  The truth might be a mixture of the two, but either way, there are parallels here with Thomas More’s relationship with Henry VIII, or the mirror on the wall’s outspokenness to the wicked queen in Snow White:  John was simply too bluntly honest, and, perversely given his dress sense, too charismatic, to be left at large.

And now that he’s been thrown inside for pointing to Jesus as the Lord and Saviour of the world – now, after all that, there’s a bit of a wobble.   You can just imagine him sitting in his prison cell, his camel hair frankly in need of a good wash, chewing on a locust he’d saved from earlier, and suddenly thinking ‘I hope to goodness I’ve got this right!’ John has been preaching pretty  strong stuff about the axe lying at the root of the trees, but Jesus hasn’t been behaving in this harsh sort of way at all.  So John asks a straight question: ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’  Well, I say it’s a straight question – it’s a straight question by Advent standards.  ‘Are you the one who is to come?’ is actually pretty confusing, isn’t it – it’s just begging for the answer, ‘No – I’m here already!’ But you know what he means.  So it’s a pretty direct question – are you the one we’ve been waiting for?

So you might think it ought to get a straight answer.

A while ago, I got chatting to a lady on a bus.  My scarf had been covering my collar, so it took a while for her to realise what sort of job I did.  And when she did, she exclaimed, ‘Ooh!  I’ve never actually had a proper chat with a real vicar before!’  We got talking about my job, and after a bit, she looked at me with her head on one side, and said, ‘You must have to know absolutely everything, because you need to provide the answers to everyone’s questions!’

Well, there were two ways I could have played that one.

But I decided I couldn’t get away with it. 

So where does the truth lie?  What do you say? What happens to questions about God? 

Well, look what happens to John the Baptist’s rugged and straight-ish question.  You might have thought Jesus would just tell John’s disciples to say ‘Yes!  Spot on – he’s the one!’ – you might have thought that he’d provide an answer.

But he doesn’t.  Instead, he echoes the beautiful passage from Isaiah that we heard in our first reading today – the passage that tells us that the wilderness shall be glad and the desert blossom, and that at that time, the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.  ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see,’ he says, ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’

Is this an answer?  Well, not in the sense that the lady on the bus meant.  It’s not a straight answer to a straight question. 

Of course, this isn’t really a surprise.  This is, after all, Jesus.  Jesus who speaks in riddles and stories and wry asides and sideways glances.  Jesus whose responses never compel assent – never demand faith – but always invite his hearers in to a deeper understanding, a deeper relationship with him.

The American poet, Emily Dickinson, might have been writing about this sort of response in her poem about truth:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant

Success in circuit lies.

Too bright for our infirm delight

The truth’s superb surprise.

As lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind.

No, I said to the woman on the bus. I don’t have all the answers.  Sometimes I don’t have any answers at all.  But I think my calling is to work with others to hold open the space where the questions can be asked.  Asked and wrestled with before God.

Of course, the danger with this response to the woman on the bus’s question is that if you take it the wrong way, you can descend into a kind of mush.  This is what gives liberalism a bad name.  If you simply say, ‘Well, I don’t know anything much, but let’s all just sit here and see what happens,’ then you end up believing in nothing, standing for nothing, being nothing.  And that is absolutely not what Jesus does, and it is not what we should do either.

So what should we do?  How should we be, with the big questions about Jesus?  We don’t want to disappear into nothingness, but then again, Jesus’ own behaviour would suggest that we should be cautious about being didactic, about simply having check-lists of answers and a set idea of the facts.  However much shouting comes, embarrassingly, from the shallow end of the Church of England, this is not telling it slant, and it’s not telling the truth either.

So what can we do?

I think the key to avoiding, on the one hand, didacticism, and on the other, the wrong sort of liberalism – this mushy nothingness – actually lies in Jesus’ question to the crowds about John:   ‘What did you go out to see?’

Of course, they went out to see a prophet – and however unlikely a figure John was, he was undoubtedly one of those, and more, as Jesus says.  So they didn’t go out to see a reed shaken by the wind, or fancy people in fine clothes.  They knew why they were going out into the wilderness, and they hung on to their intention, and so the one they found there was utterly compelling to them.

As we hold open this questioning space of the church, this is the question we need to interrogate us: ‘What did you go out to see?’  We need, at this time of Advent and through the year, to clear this space and make sure that, through it, we are looking in the right direction.

There was a brilliant picture in one of the papers a few years ago, printed under the headline, Keep your eyes peeled, chaps.  There’ll be a whale along shortly.

This story was set off the coast of Cork, where there had been sightings of some huge, humpback whales.  Normally, the whale watching trips off this part of the Irish coast stop at the end of November, but the prospect of tourists sighting one of these amazing creatures kept the boat operators busy through December, too.  I’ll let the paper continue the tale, with the words from under the picture:

Patiently the whale-watchers stood on deck…Oh, if only they'd looked behind them!

For there, almost entirely clear of the surface, was this 45ft beauty, turning in the sort of heart-stopping display that would have had their cameras whirring.

By the time any of them might have realised, however, the majestic mammal would have disappeared again into the waters…

The picture shows the whale watchers, all with their backs to the colossal, 30-tonne whale, intently watching… a seagull.

They knew what they’d gone out to see, but they’d lost track of it.  They’d become distracted.  And so they missed it.

So our task, as we clear the space, is to have the confidence, with John the Baptist, to ask questions.  To sit with them.  Not to accept easy or glib answers, or to be beguiled by those who give them.  Our task is to resist the certainties of the world: the certainties peddled by fundamentalists of any stripe, and the certainties which come from apathy – from not being bothered to engage or think; not being bothered to be captivated.

 But our task is to do all this whilst looking in the right direction – to do it with minds and hearts filled with hope and expectation.  To do it with joy.

And so we look to John, who shows us the direction we should be looking in.  John, who isn’t perfect in dress or manners.  John who has doubts.  But John who shows us the way to look to Christ, for whom we watch and wait.  Christ who is the beginning and the end.  The question and the answer.

Amen.