On love and justice: a sermon for the third Sunday of Advent

This is my sermon for Advent 3 here in Kew. Our readings were: Isaiah 35:1-10, James 5:7-10 and Matthew 11:2-11 (and yes, I’ve been having a Narnia season)

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Each week in advent we light a candle on our advent wreath, to remind us that the light of the world is coming, and that that day is getting closer. Today’s is pink, in honour of the tradition of celebrating ‘gaudete’ Sunday in the midst of advent’s solemnity: a reminder of the joy that is coming.

There are a number of themes that can be used to help us reflect during advent – different ‘quartets’ if you like. Hope, peace, joy and love is one; Patriarchs, prophets, John the Baptist and Mary, another. And they offer a helpful framework for us as we reflect on what and who we are waiting for.  Another quartet of themes is death, judgement, heaven and hell. Cheerful stuff, you might think, given that we just lit a joyful pink candle.  And yet today’s readings talk of judgement.

We don’t often like to think about God as a judge or about judgement day. We tend to focus more on God as love, and on the welcome that we hope and expect to receive when our life ends—or when Jesus returns. And indeed, judgement has all-too-often been used as a stick to beat people with if they don’t fit or behave in the ways we think that they should.

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But that’s not quite what’s going on in our readings. And it’s important that we remember that God’s love is such that it is justice: it cannot abide evil and always works to heal pain and harm—and in that it does judge. It discerns what is evil and what does harm, and eschews it, calling all of creation towards love instead. For what would be distinctive or worth waiting for about God’s kingdom if it didn’t do away with injustice and evil?

Our readings today tell us something about the nature of God as judge and the consequences of his judgement, which Isaiah describes as salvation.

“Here is your God, he will come with vengeance and terrible recompense” says Isaiah— and the consequence of this will be that the wilderness and dry land shall be glad, water will flow in the desert, which will bloom, and the way will be paved for God’s people to come to his holy city. For the judgement here is upon those who have kept God’s people from God—those who have conquered his people and kept them in exile. Those who wait for God and seek him out will return to him.

Indeed, Jesus suggests that people often judge themselves in the presence of God: “blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me”, he says. That is those who welcome him and what he offers—not those who question him, criticise him, or judge him a false teacher or a blasphemer. Not those who crucify him.

This is a judgement in which those that fear, reject or mock the love and goodness of God, as we encounter it in Christ, turn away from him—those that do not want, or do not know how to want, to embrace him cannot. Those of you who are familiar with the finale of CS Lewis’ The Last Battle might think of the way that the creatures of Narnia come face to face with Aslan at the end of time and either turn into the door of the stable and into the light, or away into his shadow—in a moment of silent decision.   

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Matthew’s Jesus makes it clear that he is different from earthly judges and rulers in the way that his judgement is always in pursuit of the healing work of justice and love. It is not the potentially arbitrary judgement of an earthly judge or ruler. He is not set up as an unaccountable ‘judge, jury, and executioner’—the fundamental goodness of his nature does not permit this.  

In this passage of Matthew, it is clear that Jesus is not Herod, the local king who had imprisoned John the Baptist.  A king who used reeds as his symbol on coins, and who wore soft robes and lived in a royal palace. A king who would end up executing John the Baptist because of a foolish promise he made to a young girl he fancied. Who would permit Jesus’ execution to save his own power. The kind of king well-described as a ‘reed shaken by the wind’, whose affections and judgements could not be trusted.

In contrast, Jesus is the king born in a spare room to a family on the move: first under the direction of the Roman authorities and then out of a real fear of the earlier king Herod, who saw the coming of another Jewish king as a threat. A king whose coming was pointed out in the wilderness by a wild-man prophet, whose ministry began with a baptism of repentance and which continued as described in the words that Jesus sends to John: “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.”

This echoes the words of Isaiah, speaking of God’s salvation: “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a dear, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”  

It is a judgment whose loving goodness can be trusted and discerned in its appearance in the world—which we await with patience and with eagerness.

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In a statement they made this week, Southwark’s bishops said, “Christ has always been at the be heart of Christmas and those who claim him need to be serious about what he stands for. The authority of a person’s faith may be judged by their actions.”

When John sends messengers to ask if Jesus is the figure that the Old Testament prophets point to—the Messiah, or the shoot of Jesse—Jesus points to all the things that he has been doing to enable John to judge that he is the one. And he says to the crowds who hear this exchange that John is a prophet, the one who prepares the way – who has authority and knowledge that allows him to discern this this.

In their statement, the bishops were speaking, of course, about Tommy Robinson’s latest campaign, to put Christ back into Christmas—something that he has linked to ‘reclaiming our heritage and culture.’ But in pointing out the difference between himself and John and the likes of Herod, Jesus makes it clear that Christ who comes at Christmas is one who comes in judgement of the world and its cultures, as well as being for their salvation. These two things cannot be separated. For the salvation and healing of the world, its restoration to God and the blossoming of the new creation involves the discernment, judgement and uprooting of all that gets in the way of God’s grace-full love, justice and goodness.

The Christ who comes at Christmas, who has always been at its heart and whose return we await, is the one who will transform the wilderness: even the wildernesses in which we find ourselves and our world today. He is the one who heals the blind and the lame. The one who eschews soft robes and royal palaces, in solidarity with the migrant who travels in the hope of safe welcome. The one whose judgement is good and offers salvation, not just for himself or a special few, but for all who welcome him and follow him.

Blessed are those who take no offence at him.

Amen.