Advent thoughts - Wednesday of Advent 1

First lines of second verse, Verbum supernum prodiens, Hymn # 63

Light for our darkness! Vision for our blindness! We cry for a sign, a marker, a clue--some means of finding our way out of the mess we make of things. How can we be delivered from our illusions, our deceits, the trivia with which we divert our attention and clutter our lives?

Psalm 12 concludes with that frightening truth.

Perhaps we can join Bartimaeus and cry out to Jesus that he might open our eyes. The song from my Baptist childhood just came to mind:

Open my eyes that I may see
glimpses of truth thou hast for me....
Open my eyes, illumine me, Spirit divine.

--Clara H. Scott, 1895
#454 in The United Methodist Hymnal

What a bouleversement [I'm grasping here, people, and the French word for overturning things just sounds right] there will be when the scales fall from our eyes. Imagine how Saul of Tarsus felt when he looked at the same world as before and saw it in a totally new way, his values suddenly reversed!

Some of us may be tax-collectors (traitors) and prostitutes (or at least sluts). We all carry inner shames and burdens of guilt, both real and false. Some of us are perhaps a bit too proud of being reprobates (mea culpa), troublemakers (we like to call it being prophetic), mockers and scoffers (we call it being sophisticated), and fools for Christ (when we are actually just acting like damned fools, period). But we always find someone else we can point to with "righteous" judgment, those whom we deem the true outcasts, the unwashed, the unworthy, the wicked, the unredeemable.

Kris Kristofferson sang "Jesus was a Capricorn," a song dear to me back in my first seminary days. Here is the chorus:

'Cause everybody's gotta have somebody to look down on
Who they can feel better than at any time they please
Someone doin' somethin' dirty decent folks can frown on
If you can't find nobody else, then help yourself to me

Well, this is what Jesus had to say about where we stand:

“Truly I tell you, the tax-collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax-collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.” (Matthew 21:31b-32)

The merciful message buried in this deliberately shocking admonition is that though "the wicked" will precede us "righteous" folk, their getting there "ahead of us" still implies that we will get there too. Late and shamefaced, perhaps, but once there it will not matter when or how we got there. And the gates of the New Jerusalem are never--I repeat--never shut.

--the BB