THE THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Year B
December 14, 2014
Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28
Pastor David Tryggestad
Concordia Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
I felt a shadow pass over me,
though not a shadow of foreboding.
So fleeting it was that had I blinked
I might have missed it,
and the thought of missing it
made me grateful that I had not.
The eagle sliced a shadow
through the otherwise brightly lighted landscape
that I had grown accustomed to.
I needed the shadow to remind me
that I dwell in radiant glory.[1]
Today is the commemoration of John of the Cross, the Spanish
mystic and poet, who lived a generation or so after Martin Luther. As was and
still is typical practice for members of a Roman Catholic order, John took the
name of a person he admired from the Bible or from history. He chose to name
himself after John the baptizer, in part because he was born on the day of the
commemoration of the forerunner of Jesus. So it seems doubly fitting that we
might consider something of the life and writings of John of the Cross as we
wade into our texts for today.
John was born in Spain in 1542 into dire poverty,
and his father died when he was but a child, leaving his mother and her three
sons destitute. When John was a teenager, he worked at a hospital and also
receive his first formal education at a Jesuit school. He became a Carmelite
friar, and shortly after met Teresa of Avila, noted for her religious fervor
and zeal, especially in instituting reforms in her order of nuns, reforms that
reverted back to some of the more austere practices of renunciation of earlier
times. John came under her reforming influences and began instituting some of
the same austere practices, which alarmed some of the religious powers-that-be
opposed to the reforms. In 1577, at the age of 35, John was arrested.
He spent the next nine months in hellish conditions [in a
6’x10’ cell]—damp frigid cold that winter, stifling heat in the summer,
darkness which badly strained his eyes (the only opening was a two-inch
horizontal slit near the ceiling), lice infestation, dysentery from the stale
scraps of sardines and bread, and vomit-inducing stench due to the fact that
his hateful jailer would only change his waste bucket every several days. Not
least was the constant humiliation and frequent torture from fellow “Christian”
friars, who took him out a few times each week into the rectory at mealtimes,
where he was made to kneel like a dog and endure much verbal scorn and bodily
flogging and caning for daring to help launch the reform with Teresa. . . . The
period was especially hard on [John] because his own great humility made him
begin to seriously doubt himself . . .
Yet it was during this Dark Night of the Soul (he apparently
coined the phrase), this period of being stripped of all material and spiritual
consolations, this being “totally undone and re-fashioned in God,” that [John]
issued forth the early verses of some of his major poems. A new jailer had come
in after six months, and given John a fresh tunic and a pen, ink and small
notebook for “composing a few things profitable to devotion.” . . . The first
part of his Spiritual Canticle poem and other verses soon followed, [expressing]
his intense realizations of the transpersonal God, his love for the personal
Lord, and the blazing power of Spirit, which had stoked a profound fire in him,
overcoming the interior and exterior darkness of his dire situation.[2]
We will return to John of the Cross. But now to John the
baptizer, after whom John of the Cross took his name.
For the second Sunday in a row we hear from John the
baptizer—last week from the Gospel of Mark, today from the Gospel of yet
another John, John the Evangelist.
In today’s Gospel, John the baptizer points directly to
Jesus: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a
witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He
himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light” (John 1:6-8).
John the baptizer also went to prison, to King Herod’s
prison. However, unlike his namesake, John of the Cross, John the baptizer
never got out of prison alive. You recall the story of King Herod’s beguiling
niece demanding the head of John the baptizer on a platter during the King’s
birthday party. Despite his imprisonment, John remained faithful to his message
and to his Lord.
The Apostle Paul also knew imprisonment, beatings, even
being stoned and left for dead. Yet Paul could astonish fellow prisoners in his
singing for joy in the Lord. In his letter to the Philippians, in whose midst
Paul had been imprisoned along with Silas while they were in Philippi, Paul
writes: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I will say, Rejoice” (Philippians
4:4). In our Second Reading for today, Paul writes, “Rejoice always, pray
without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God
in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18).
We talked quite a long time during Sandwich & Scripture
Bible study this past Wednesday about this last verse: “. . . give thanks in
all circumstances . . .”
Paul could rejoice and give thanks in all circumstances
because he knew the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, his Lord
(Philippians 3:8). John the baptizer could rejoice and give thanks in all circumstances
because he knew that he himself was not the light, but that he came to bear
witness to the light. A verse that is omitted from our Gospel for today
follows: “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world”
(John 1:9). John the baptizer could rejoice and give thanks in all
circumstances because he knew the true light of Christ Jesus.
John of the Cross could rejoice and give thanks in all
circumstances because he knew the true light of Christ Jesus. John wrote that,
just as the moon does not have light on its own, but receives and reflects the
light of the sun, so, too, do we receive and reflect the light of God:
Would not the sun have lost its mind
if it said to the moon,
“Dear, give me more light.”
For does not all the moon’s beauty
and charm come
from the sun’s existence;
could we even see the moon if it was
not for the sun’s being?
Is anything we see of earth and sky
and each other not dependent
on the Sun, on the real Sun—God?
Are we not some extension of His
Being?
Does not all form have its life in
reflecting Him? It does.[3]
“Does not all form have its life in
reflecting Him?” John of the Cross could rejoice and give thanks in all
circumstances because he lived in and reflected the light of God, in the light
of Christ Jesus.
Do we not all live our lives within
the context of the radiant light, the radiant glory of Christ Jesus?
I felt a shadow pass over me,
though not a shadow of foreboding.
So fleeting it was that had I blinked
I might have missed it,
and the thought of missing it
made me grateful that I had not.
The eagle sliced a shadow
through the otherwise brightly lighted landscape
that I had grown accustomed to.
I needed the shadow to remind me
that I dwell in radiant glory.
Thanks be
to God!
[3]John of
the Cross, “A Nursery Rhyme” (excerpt), trans. Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West (New York: Penguin Compass, 2002), 313.
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