‘What did you go out to look at?’ Jesus asks the crowd in this week’s
Gospel, ‘A reed shaken in the wind?” It
is an image that has caught the imagination, and provided books and poems, as
well as sermons, with a striking title. But what exactly does it mean? The
exchange occurs in a section of Matthew’s Gospel that is mostly about the
significance of John the Baptist. Clearly, ordinary people were much struck by
this extraordinary man, and here Jesus is prompting them to ask themselves why.
Some commentaries suggest that from time to time freak winds blowing
through the reeds around the Sea of Galilee created strikingly unusual
formations. On this interpretation, Jesus is saying to the people ‘Surely you
didn’t go to see John as some kind of freak?’ But they can hardly have been
drawn by his social stature either. No one could have been less like the
political dignitary who dresses in soft robes and lives in a royal palace. No,
they went to see a prophet. And that means, consciously or unconsciously, they went
to see him out of spiritual longing.
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| The Prophet Isaiah (1513) -- Grunewald |
This week’s Old Testament lesson is one of Isaiah's most famous
passages, and one with which the crowd would have been thoroughly familiar. It
gives graphic expression to that longing “Then shall the eyes of the blind be
opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame shall leap like a deer and
the tongue of the speechless sing for joy’. John is the harbinger of this
vision, Jesus its fulfillment. The fulfillment is not all sweetness and light,
however. ‘Here is your God, come with vengeance, and terrible recompense’.
Once again, the themes of the first and second comings are interwoven.
The First Coming of carols, social festivities, and the baby in the manger
falls easily within our comfort zone. We know what to expect, and we like what
we know. The Second Coming when (as the Epistle puts it) ‘the Judge is standing
at the doors!’ is a much more unsettling affair, inevitably generating a
mixture of personal anxiety and spiritual incomprehension.
Advent is the opportunity to switch familiarity and surprise
around. Since divine judgment on the
shabby lives human beings so often lead is precisely what it is reasonable to
expect, we ought to find the Incarnation – God with us -- spiritually
surprising.
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