Step out into the cold, early on a wintry morning, and you’ll find yourself suddenly awake. A second ago you were yawning and rubbing your eyes, but now you’re fully alert. The cold has shocked you awake. On a really cold morning, when your breath billows up like clouds and the snow crunches under your feet, it seems that all your senses are heightened.
You feel the cold coming in and out of your lungs. You hear every breath. Everything stands out more clearly in the crisp air. The snow sparkles in the early morning light, a cardinal perches on the fence. Everything seems somehow more real, more alive. And, perhaps, more perilous: somewhere in the back of your mind you know the cold can burn like fire.
That’s what Advent is like. Like stepping out into the cold, and being shocked awake. That’s what the season of Advent aims to do: to shock us awake. To snap us out of our drowsiness and indifference. To draw us out of our dim hovels into the morning light. To awaken us to true joy. To confront us with what is Real. To show us our end.
Look again at today’s Gospel. Do you see how John the Baptist works to shock his audience awake? That’s what his fiery language is about. “O generation of vipers!”; “The axe is laid unto the root of the trees”; “The chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable.” It is language designed to jolt its hearers awake. John the Baptist does what Flannery O’Connor sought to do in her novels: sometimes, she said, “you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
John does just that. Crowds of people are going out into the wilderness to be baptized by him — and John calls them a bunch of snakes, slithering away from a fire, only concerned with saving their skins. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” he thunders. “Bring forth fruits worthy of repentance.”
He says, in effect: Don’t think you can rely on the faith of your fathers. You must change your life. Show by your actions that you have turned away from sin, that you have returned to the Lord. And don’t think you can wait for a more convenient time, until after you’ve had your youthful fun, or after you’ve established your career, or after you’ve married and had kids, or after the kids are grown up. Now is the time. It’s not something you can afford to put off. The Lord is coming, and you must face judgment. You are only ever one breath away from standing before your Maker. “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
We read John’s words in Advent because they are meant for us. His words are meant to shock us awake, to snap us out of our drowsiness and indifference. To confront us with eternity, with what Blaise Pascal calls “a question of ourselves, and our all.”[1] Pascal points out how absurd it is for anyone to be habitually indifferent to matters of ultimate importance.
“With everything else it is quite different,” he says, “they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety or emotion. It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest.”
Do you see yourself in those words? “One and the same heart at once so sensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest.”
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Advent aims to draw us out of our dim hovels into the morning light. And that light reveals how half-hearted and insensitive and wretched we are, how unprepared we are for the Lord who comes to judge both the quick and the dead. Not to abandon us in our wretchedness, but to call us to renewed repentance. Advent urges us to pray “that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light.” And it teaches us that this is a matter of the utmost urgency: “we are sorely hindered by our sins” — and so we must cry out, “Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with thy great might come among us … let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us.”
When John the Baptist preached to the people in the wilderness, his words cut them to the quick, and they asked him, “What shall we do, then?” Did you notice how he responded? John had something particularly challenging to say to each group of people who came to him. As George Caird, the Oxford biblical scholar, puts it: “To each class he spelled out in simple terms the meaning of repentance. To the ordinary, selfish folk, blind to the needs of others because of their preoccupation with security, to tax collectors whose trade was a form of licensed extortion, to soldiers accustomed to line their pockets by intimidation and blackmail, he gave the same injunction: renounce your besetting sin.”[3] Every class or category of human society has its besetting sin; every vocation and every stage of life has its characteristic temptations. What are yours? Which sins particularly hinder you? What are you going to do about it?
Once, when I was younger and still living on the farm with my parents, I woke up early on a snowy morning to do the chores. It was very cold, and it was still dark when I drove the tractor back to the silo to get feed for the cows. Coming around a corner, the tractor lights shone over the fields, and revealed a scene of stunning beauty. I can still see it, how the snow shone, how the drifts glittered like so many diamonds. The beauty of that moment drew me out beyond myself, and, years later, the memory fills me with joy.
Perhaps more than anything else, Advent awakens us to joy. It trains us to rejoice in our coming Lord. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” says St. Paul, “and again I say, Rejoice.” Why? Because “the Lord is at hand.” This is the central reality set before us in Advent: The Lord is at hand. We have seen, in the preaching of John the Baptist, how the coming of the Lord Jesus can be a threat: he comes as the Judge, the one “with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4:13), from whom no secrets are hid.
But John the Baptist also shows the promise and joy of the coming of the Lord. He speaks of Christ as the “bridegroom” and himself as “the friend of the bridegroom.” “He that hath the bride is the bridegroom,” he says, “but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled” (John 3:29). That is, the one who comes to judge both the quick and the dead also comes as the bridegroom. The Lord Jesus comes to judge and, as Paul Griffiths puts it, “to embrace his beloveds.”
This is why we rejoice that the Lord is at hand: because the Lord Jesus “also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us” (Eph. 5:2). We are his beloveds. You and I are the objects of his love. The coming Lord is Christ crucified, “the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). His love is the offer of infinite joy. His love is, as an old prayer puts it, “where true joys are to be found.” My true joy is found in the love of Christ.
Advent awakens us to where true joys are to be found. “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
[1] Pascal, Pensees, §427.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.
[3] G.B. Caird, The Gospel of St Luke.
The Rev. Christopher Yoder is rector of All Souls’ Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City. Raised in western Pennsylvania, he studied at Wheaton College and Duke Divinity School.
