Music Notes: Third Sunday of Advent
The two middle Sundays of Advent focus on John the Baptist, drawing on several different aspects and episodes across the three lectionary years.
The Gospel this Sunday comes from later in the saint’s life. John, languishing in prison, begins to doubt his life’s work – even the very identity of the one whom he had once recognized and acclaimed as Lamb of God. Hearing what Jesus was up to – was it not what he expected? – he was moved to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Where were the axe, the winnowing-fork, the fire? he perhaps wondered. Had he had it wrong all this time?
John’s vocation had, after all, cost him dearly, as the text of our Offertory anthem (the Collect for the Feast of his Nativity) spells out: his message was a ‘preaching of repentance’ (a change of hearts and ways); he not only offered ‘doctrine’ (teaching) but also was driven to ‘constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth’s sake’. Was it worth it? Did anyone listen? Did the world change?
We too might sometimes ask the same kinds of questions: Where is God in a desperate world, in our own complicated lives? Even (especially?) when we try to follow the way our faith sets forth for us, where are its fruits? Does any of this matter? The musical setting of our anthem, from the English Romantic School, portrays some of this anguish through constantly shifting, unresolved harmonies, and long ascending and descending lines (long too because of the single long sentence that constitutes the prayer). Only when we ask questions, take stock, look harder, though, do we grow – and pain can be our prompt.
For John, the answer came: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor receive good news. That is, wherever there is healing, new life, good news, the Kingdom of God is truly at hand, waiting for us to discover it.
Advent calls us to make room, clear the way, remove whatever stops us seeing this Kingdom that is being revealed. Our postcommunion hymn, ‘On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry’ [76], takes John’s earlier proclamation of the coming of Christ as its point of departure, urging us to ‘make straight the way for God’ in our hearts lest we ‘waste away like flowers’ (both references to the well-known 40th chapter of Isaiah). This may require an axe or winnowing-fork, or maybe at least some pruning shears and a dustbin for those unexamined habits, priorities, and language that choke the gardens of our lives and spirits. John’s message – don’t rely on your supposed status to save you; take responsibility for your own sin; don’t take from, but rather share with, others; look for the One who is always coming into the world – is a good place to start.
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