All Flesh

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, AD 2021 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What was the Temple to the people of Israel? Why was it such a big deal? If you were to bulldoze a modern church or a synagogue or a mosque, couldn’t you just put up a new one? It’s only a building, after all. But this is a modern misunderstanding.

The Temple wasn’t just a building to the ancient Israelites. The Temple was the House of God on earth—and yes, God is everywhere; they understood that early on. But the Temple is where His unfettered glory breaks into our world, where nothing stands between God and humankind. The Temple, then, is Heaven on earth.

The design is easy enough to imagine. Think of a rectangle divided by a curtain. The sanctuary and its golden gates are to the east, in order to face the rising sun. But the west side of the rectangle is the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Holy of Holies. Here stand the great cherubs, who surround the throne of God. Here stood once the Ark of the Covenant, which served as Yahweh’s footstool and mercy seat.

The sanctuary was done up as the Garden of Eden, where Adam had once served as King and High Priest for the whole of Creation: there were the sea and the stars and the lush vegetation, the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. There too was a great golden menorah, a seven-branched lamp made to look like a Tree of Life, with spring almond blossoms, bearing light as its fruit.

And then there was the curtain, the veil of the Temple. But this is too ephemeral a word. The curtain was more like wall—60 feet wide, 30 feet tall, and four inches thick—woven of blue, purple, white, and red thread, together representing the visible universe of air, water, earth, and fire. Or so record the scribes. Thus the Temple presents us with a picture of sacred reality: of the material world enfolding a spiritual core, and of the Creator as the heart within the Creation.

Only one man could pass through that veil to enter the Holy of Holies, and only on one day of the year. The High Priest, on the Day of Atonement, would take off his robe of blue, purple, white, and red, and don instead a pure white garment. A rope would be tied about his waist in case the sheer glory of God struck him dead and his body would then have to be dragged back out. Amidst a cloud of incense, he would then pass through the curtain, ascending into the presence of God, as though he were an angel—as though he were a son of God.

And there he would offer the mixed blood of a bull, representing humanity in our sin, and a goat, representing the divine. And this union of the life of God and Man would renew the Creation again, forgiving us all our sins, and the priest would be sent forth—out from Heaven, out from the Holy of Holies—back into our world. There is evidence that, earlier on, the Kings did this too. The Kings and the High Priests were then adopted, anointed sons of God, come back, come down, from Heaven.

All of this should sound familiar: donning white, to enter the Holy of Holies, where our High Priestly King, as Son of God, offers up on our behalf a Blood both human and divine for the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of the cosmos. Right?

The problem back then was that, for all the language of adoptionism, the Kings and High Priests of old very much remained only human. They had foibles and conflicts and sins. There’s a reason why they had to keep going back year after year, for yet another Day of Atonement. And there were always rival groups. Many priests had been purged from the Temple under Josiah, and they never forgot, nor forgave. After the Exile, Temple priests were Persian puppets; and later, under the Maccabees, a warrior family, with neither royal nor High Priestly blood, claimed both anointed offices by right of conquest—illegitimately, in the eyes of many.

By the time of Jesus, then, the Temple was widely viewed as corrupt. Some continued to serve there, as did Zechariah; others worshipped at the Temple yet criticized the institution, as would Jesus; while still others rejected the Temple altogether and formed their own priestly communities out in the desert, like the Essenes. Everyone was praying for the promised Messiah, the cosmic Christ, who would be both King and High Priest yet not like those of old. This King, this Christ, would not be a priest lifted up to Heaven but would be Heaven come down to earth: not a man become an angel, but an angel—nay, perhaps even a god—made into a Man.

And His Day of Atonement would be the last one, the final Day of Judgment: an eternal atonement, eternal at-one-ment, forever rending the Temple veil and tearing down all division between God and His children. My friends, if you want to understand the Jesus of Luke’s Gospel, then you must understand the Temple.

Now, then: Zechariah was a priest, and a good one, by all accounts. One day he was chosen to offer incense at the Temple in Jerusalem—a duty and a privilege performed but once in a lifetime. And there within the House of God, at the borderlands of the unseen and the seen, he experiences a vision. An angel named Gabriel, “the Strong One of God,” appears to him and announces that Zechariah shall father a son with his heretofore barren wife, and he shall name the child John, and this John shall be none other than herald to the Messiah, the prophesied Forerunner of the prophesied Christ.

And Zechariah, in his shock, in his disbelief, is struck dumb, so that he cannot speak, not for the whole nine months of his wife’s subsequent pregnancy. When the child at last is born, his tongue is loosed, and the father sings a blessing for his infant son. This we call the Benedictus, the Song of Zechariah, and we sang it as our Psalm today: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare His ways!” Thus is born to us John the Baptist.

What can we say of John that Christ Himself has not already said? “Among those born of women,” Jesus proclaims, “no-one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” His preaching was so powerful and his ministry so great that people wondered if he weren’t the reincarnation of Elijah, greatest of the old northern prophets. Others whispered that he might be an angel clothed in human flesh. For if the Messiah is God come down, God come out from the Holy of Holies, would it not make sense that His herald would be an angel come down as well? To this day, in Eastern iconography, John is portrayed with wings.

There’s even a religion based on the veneration of John the Baptist as the greatest of all prophets. They’re called the Mandaeans, and they’re still around today. Yet whoever is least in the Kingdom of Heaven, says Jesus, is even greater than John.

“See,” spake the Lord through Malachi the prophet, “I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me … but who can endure the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like caustic fuller’s soap … And he shall purify the descendants of Levi”—which is to say, the priests—“like silver and gold.” All of which is true of John. He was caustic and fiery and uncompromising, with a lashing, cutting tongue, who spoke truth to poor and rich alike, the powerful and lowly together. He forgave the wicked, even as he called them broods of vipers.

If you know nothing else of John, I want you to know this: everything that Jesus does, John did first. John preached in the wilderness, baptized the repentant, even gathered a cadre of loyal disciples, several of whom would be Jesus’ Apostles. And when John died, Jesus knew that His own death was near at hand. The difference is this: “I am not the Messiah,” John cried. “Behold,” as he pointed to Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of all the world!” He was not so much a prophet as he was a living prophecy. John was Jesus’ Forerunner in all things, even unto an ignominious death.

And why did he do it? Why did he live in the wilderness, clothed in wretched camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey? Why did a man of priestly birth reject the Temple to preach by the river to harlots and soldiers and tax collectors? He did it, Luke tells us, so that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” All flesh! Not just one man piercing the veil to witness the glory once in a year, but that glory itself come forth, into our world, into our flesh, as the Lord God Jesus Christ.

He is the Temple now. He is our Heaven on earth. He is the King and the High Priest and the Sacrifice and the Atonement. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, and by His Blood shall all flesh see the salvation of God!

We think of John as uncompromising in righteousness, in strictness, but he’s not. He is uncompromising in mercy, in forgiveness, in fearlessly proclaiming salvation to all sinners through Jesus Christ our Lord. Like refiner’s fire and fuller’s soap, that white-hot grace burns through us—kills and resurrects us! All of us, all flesh! And we are left pure and clean and robed in white, as sons of God in Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.