Advent Friday 2 - St John of the Cross

Readings: Is 48:17-19; Ps 1; Mt 11:16-19

Many people loathe Christmas. I do, too. But what I despise isn’t the solemnity of the Incarnation, the celebration of the Word becoming flesh, dwelling with us so that we could see his glory, but what our secular world has made of it: the saccharine conviviality, the relentless jolliness, the artificial cheer, the being penned up with people we spend the rest of the year avoiding – no wonder families fall apart under the pressure of the ‘festive’ season. Another hallmark of the pagan gluttony with which our contemporary culture has debased the religious feast is, of course, overtired, overstimulated, stressed out and thoroughly unpleasant children. Which brings me to today’s gospel.

In the passage we’ve heard Matthew depicts the contemporaries of the Baptist and Jesus as being like disagreeable children who complain that others do not meet their desires and expectations. One group complains that the others refuse to respond to either the wedding game “we piped for you, and you did not dance”, or the funeral game “we wailed, and you did not mourn”. The point is that there is no positive response to either Jesus or John by their opponents. This also has ecclesiological significance for ourselves today: both Jesus and John before us suffered rejection, but we should not let this discourage us from being alert to God’s commandments, from following him in the way we must go, as Isaiah has told us.

Certainly John of the Cross had every reason to be discouraged. In his attempt to lead his brothers back into the way they must go, he had been persuaded by Teresa of Avila to join the Discalced Reform, but was seized and imprisoned for a time by those who rejected it, and him. Some may find the stark demands of his mystical asceticism, his refusal to settle for anything less than God - with the concomitant dispossession of our usual religious sensibilities, the ‘dark night’ of the soul - a terrifying prospect. But it’s important to note that this is only a preliminary, which yields to an awareness of God as the centre of our being, of the world’s being, of the Spirit praying within us with words we do not know how to utter. The Carmelite stresses the experience of God in faith as a vision of the creator, as well as the “wise, ordered, gracious and loving mutual correspondence” among creatures (Spiritual Canticle B xxxix. 11.), in this perhaps against the somewhat over-individualistic assurance of faith emphasised by the churches of the Reformation.