Listen again to that very specific account that introduces
the third chapter of St Luke’s gospel which is today’s gospel reading: In
the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was
governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip,
ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene,
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John
son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
No wonder historians of all ages have applauded St Luke,
whose gospel we’re now reading in Year C of the Sunday Lectionary, as being one
of them. You can check his historical facts. We can consequently be 95% certain
John the Baptist and Jesus Christ met in the River Jordan where the first baptised
the second.
You can’t
see God but at one point in history you could because God became one of
us. John the Baptist was sent as the pointer to this. More than that, a pointer
to the one who’d help everyone who wanted to know God to know God and share
God’s life for ever.
To be a Christian is to share the baptism St John the Baptist came to speak of, the anointing in the Holy Spirit that makes the invisible God known as surely as the wind makes the air known.
A God we could see would actually be less wonderful than the
God Christians believe in. We’d be able to contain him in our minds! Instead
the Christian vision of God is one that expands continually from our limited
dimensions to his unlimited ones. If you want a magnificent God the price you
pay seems to be that of worshipping a God that’s invisible to mortal eyes.
How can I believe in a God I can't see? People ask us. I’m tempted to answer ‘you wouldn’t need to
believe in someone if you could actually see them!’ Faith, as the letter to the
Hebrews puts it, is conviction of things unseen (11:1).
The question ‘How can I believe in a God I can't see?’ is
really the question ‘how can I find faith?’
A quick answer is ‘you should ask God for it, ask him to open your inner eyes to his all powerful yet invisible presence’.
I remember once my faith going right into the doldrums. It
really burned low, so low I went back to the monastery at Mirfield where I
trained as a priest and asked for help.
Maybe it’s not God who’s gone but your vision of him, the monks said. Pray for a vision of God more to his dimensions and less to your own they said. For three days I prayed a prayer rather like God, if you’re there, show yourself! He did – I survive to tell the tale – he spoke to me through a leaf on a tree.
I made you. He said. I love you. I want
to fill you with my Spirit. That he did, though I’ve leaked since.
Asking God for a vision of himself more to his dimensions
and less to your own seems always to bear fruit. Faith grows – it enlarges,
especially if it is enriched by prayerful reading of the Bible and celebration
of the sacraments.
Christian mystics write of faith as a practical commitment.
In the medieval Cloud of Unknowing the anonymous mystical
author describes faith as an ‘eager dart of longing love’ that reaches out to
touch God and release his possibilities into our situation.
John the Baptist pointed to God so that we too could be drawn
to reach out to God ourselves.
How can I believe in a God I can't see? You need to make a
decision. That’s what faith is – an ongoing decision to go beyond and not
against reason. As John Donne wrote Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith
his right, by these we reach divinity.
Both faith and reason lift us to
God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our
reason and our faith. In St Luke’s record of history of John the Baptist and
Jesus Christ we should see a reasonable case for the Incarnation, the coming of
God upon the earth.
Here, in the coming of Jesus that
Advent centres upon, what we believe and what we see come together.
As St John the Evangelist writes No
one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, who has made him known (John 1:18 )
You can see him now with your mind and heart’s eye - in his
word, in the breaking of bread, in our Christian fellowship.
St John the Baptist tells us so for his words echo on
through history in our liturgy of the eucharist. John gives us the very words
that speak of Christ’s presence:
Behold the Lamb of God that takes away
the sins of the world.
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