Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Q: How did God first help us?

A: God first helped us by revealing Himself and His will, through nature and history, through many seers and saints, and especially through the prophets of Israel.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

As I have observed before, it is the teaching of this Church that the God’s self-disclosure comes in many ways, through many cultures and traditions, and not exclusively through our own religious tradition. We know where the Church is; we do not know where the Church is not. In other words, we cannot say that the religions of other cultures are NOT part of the self-disclosure of God. All that we say is that in trusting ours, we are not deceived. It is also the teaching of this Church that the ultimate self-disclosure of God is in the Incarnation: God in human flesh and blood, born of a woman who named Him Jesus.

This Incarnation was a historical process that took a very long time. Not just the nine month’s gestation, but centuries of preparation of the human religious imagination were necessary for humanity to receive the Godman. This preparation was accomplished through one part of the human family: the people of Israel, with whom God’s self-disclosure took a special form, which we call prophecy. A prophet is a messenger of God, God’s mouthpiece. The message varies according to the occasion, but it usually has to do with the future. In popular speech, a prophecy is nothing more than a prediction – a kind of historical weather-forecast. But it is much more than that in the religious sense. It is an interpretation of current events, a pronouncement on their spiritual significance, and future implications.

More often than not, the current events under prophetic scrutiny were looming disasters, such as foreign invasions. The prophets of doom always related these catastrophes to the infidelity of Israel: failures to hold up its end of the agreement with God by obeying the Law. These failures were sometimes matters of cultic observance and laxity in relationships with the neighboring heathens. BUT what is really striking about the prophets of Israel is the emphasis they placed on social justice as the most important aspect of Torah. Your ritual observance may be impeccable, but it is worthless unless accompanied by justice. Your incessant festivals are an annoyance, your burnt offerings an abomination stinking in my nostrils, but let justice roll down like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream! Saith the LORD.

And what is even more remarkable is that this message came consistently over the centuries, beginning in the Eighth Century BC. It started a little before Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse and Zoroaster, in what Karl Jaspers would call the Axial Age, the time when human consciousness all over the world seemed to emerge onto a higher plane. The age of the great sages of the world’s religious traditions. All of them had advice about the right way to live in the world. But the prophets of Israel were exceptional in their insistence on social justice, in addition to individual practice and purity. They were exceptional also in their view of the significance of time.

The passage of time was itself meaningful for the Prophets of Israel. While some traditions regarded time as a long process of decay and degeneration, the Prophets saw history as the theater of God’s gracious activity in the world. The Exodus and the forty-years’ journey to the Promised Land were the archetype for the whole movement of humanity toward a future of unimaginable glory ~ toward the future that is the dwelling-place of God, Who communicated His mysterious Name to Moses: I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. This is not a static Being of fixed, describable identity, but One unknowable and unnamable, shrouded in clouds of thick darkness, moving ahead of us, leading us whither we know not. Faith is the trust that wherever we are going it is someplace good. Later prophets expressed this glorious hope in the exalted descriptions of a heaven-sent Deliverer, who would establish God’s Reign of perfect peace and justice for ALL PEOPLE. Not just for the chosen few, but for all humanity. This Future Man would be anointed by God to renew the Davidic Kingdom and extend it to all creation. What Moses and David did for Israel, this coming Son of David would do for the whole world. The Anointed One (messiah, in Hebrew, christos in Greek) would reign forever from Jerusalem.

For Christianity, this prophetic tradition culminates in John the Baptist. Jesus said that of all born of woman there was never one greater than John the Baptist. He went on to say that the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than John the Baptist. This paradox indicates that John the Baptist represents a turning point. For Christian tradition, he is the last of the Prophets of Israel, the greatest of them because he had the honor to proclaim the arrival of the Promised One, to see Him and to know Him and to touch Him, although he died before the actual Redemption itself. Like Moses, he saw the promised land, but could not enter it. The crossing of Jordan would be led by Joshua ~ which is the Hebrew form of Jesus.

There are signs that John the Baptist had quite a following of his own, and there may have been rivalry between his disciples and the Apostolic community. Some scholars think that is behind the obvious concern of the gospels to honor John the Baptist, but to make it crystal clear that he was NOT the Messiah, but the herald of the Messiah, a friend and ally ~ a relative, even ~ but the front act, not the main attraction. The Voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare ye the way of the LORD” the Messiah’s herald. By the way, that is his proper designation. Baptist is the biblical term, but Catholic tradition has always called him precursor, forerunner. And the gospel puts the matter quite clearly, quoting John as saying of Jesus: He must increase, while I must decrease.

Every year, we hear about John in Advent and we rarely make very much about his Nativity. In fact, I have never before preached on this Feast. Maybe it seems a little strange to you as it does to me, to think about him, since I am so used to associating him with the cold and gloom of December and the general festivity of Christmastime. Maybe there is a lesson in this. The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, which has all the material about Mary’s private life, says that John’s mother, Elizabeth, was Mary’s kinswoman (cousin, by tradition), and that she was exactly six months’ pregnant when the angel came to Mary in Nazareth. That makes John the Forerunner exactly six months older than Jesus, and locates his birthday on June 24, six months and a day (don’t ask me) before Christmas. As Christmas was surrounded by the symbolism of light overcoming darkness, perhaps we are to see in John’s Feast, coming as the days begin to shorten, an echo of his own insistence that I must decrease. This time of year is also a turning point. Imperceptible as it may be in this glorious northern summer, we have turned the great corner of the year toward the Nativity of the One John proclaimed. He must increase, while I must decrease.

Decrease, he certainly did. His traditional prophetic role of confronting the powerful, exposing their misdeeds, landed him in jail and his head on the silver charger. Famous, lurid story. But that witness for justice was couched in terms of repentance, that is change of mind. John the Forerunner announced that it is time to think in a new way, perhaps even to move to a new level of consciousness. Christian monks have always considered him their prototype (he lived in the desert, ate minimally, and talked about new consciousness). He is not only the crown of the prophets, but he represents, perhaps, the integration of the mystical and the political. He must increase, while I must decrease. In a sense, that is true of every Christian. At Baptism, we die. Our old self is replaced by a new person, whose identity is now to be conformed more and more to Christ. For each of us, the I that must decrease is that life, which if we seek to save we will lose, and which if we ~ like John ~ are willing to lose, we will find.