As is mentioned in the Service Bulletin and described in more length in the December Parish Journal, starting today with the First Sunday of Advent we are using the traditional one-year lectionary for the Scripture readings for Sundays and Holy Days throughout the year, and doing so with the permission of Bishop Justin Holcomb, which is required. We are one of five parishes in our diocese doing this three-year experiment, to gain knowledge and experience of this lectionary which goes back to at least the 7th century – yes, this venerable cycle of yearly readings is one thousand, four hundred years old – so as to decide with our Bishop whether to make it our normal lectionary. More details about this can be found in this month’s Parish Journal, so give it a look.
I mention this upfront in my sermon as a way to acknowledge that the Gospel reading today might be disorienting to hear. The Entrance of Our Lord into Jerusalem we normally hear during Holy Week, for this episode in the life of Christ is the kickoff to Palm Sunday and the procession we make from the Resurrection Garden outside into our Church, holding blessed palms and singing All Glory, Laud, and Honor. The entrance into Jerusalem of our Lord on a lowly donkey is one of the stations that make up the liturgical extravaganza of Holy Week: one station to the next, from the Raising of Lazarus to the Raising of Christ in His glorious Resurrection. In hearing this Gospel today, at a great distance liturgically from Holy Week, the point of it being the Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Advent is not to think so much about Holy Week. But if that is not the point, what is the point? In what way are we to understand our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem and then into the Temple?
Whereas in Holy Week on Palm Sunday we read of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem in the literal way, and focus on that literal reading, as we hold blessed palms and accompany Him, in Advent we must read it on the spiritual level, as symbolic of our spiritual life, which is the life of receiving Christ into our mind and heart. For this we ask these questions: what is the Jerusalem into which Christ enters, and what is the Temple? Other parts of Scripture provide answers that illustrate the profound symbolism of this passage in Advent.
To identify what Jerusalem is, we have Saint John and the Revelation or Apocalypse which He recorded. Revelations 21:14 speaks of the New Jerusalem when it reads: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” Christ enters this Jerusalem – and on the walls of its foundation are the names of the apostles.
As far as the Temple, Saint Paul teaches what the Temple is. The Temple is us. As he said to the church in Corinth: “We are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” He also said, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.” And he said, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.”
Thus we put the symbolism together in this spiritual interpretation. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, as read on the First Sunday of Advent, is His entry into the proclamation of the Gospel by the Apostles. His coming into the Temple is His coming into our inward contemplation, into our soul, into our heart. And this matches the Collect prayer for all Advent, that “Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility.” The living Church and its lively faith rests on apostles and their apostolic proclamation, which makes Christ known to us and shows that Christ is always the Coming One, seeking to come to us, in every moment of every day of our earthly life. All God wants is the human heart, and He comes to our heart on a lowly donkey.
Christ in His great humility seeks to enter our heart through the preaching and teaching of the apostles recorded in the New Testament, and He desires to drive out from the Temple (which is us) all that mucks it up and gets in the way of us perceiving Christ the King of all Creation and King of us. He demands that His house, that is, His temple, that is His Body, which is us, to be a house of prayer. Hence we must keep the commandments as Saint Paul writes to us today in his epistle the Romans: let us love our neighbor as yourself, which sums up the Law, as Jesus taught, indeed because love fulfills the law. This is what keeps our Temple clean, and allows us to recognize Christ Who is the Coming One, coming to us, or in Paul’s phrase: “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.” Nearer to us, because Christ has come closer to us, having cast off the works of darkness which we wore as newborns babe in Christ having put on more of the armor of light.
Recognizing that Christ is always the Coming One is the basis of life in Christ’s Kingdom, and thus the basis of Kingdom culture. He is the Coming One by means of Scripture and by means of Sacrament. He is the Coming One through the Liturgy of the Church, which arranges Scripture and provides the Sacraments. The knowledge that Christ is always the Coming One makes for a truly lively faith, a life in the Holy Spirit: a life of constant wonder, constant awe, ever looking for the divine presence in our heart and in the world, and a constant openness to divine disclosure. The apostles, whose names are inscribed on the walls of the foundation of heaven, preached Christ the Coming One so that all who hear it with faith may be caught up in the life of wonder, awe, and openness to the coming presence of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit: living and moving and having our being within the Kingdom of Christ the King: He Who is before all things, and in Whom all things hold together, Our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the same Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
Share this post