“Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord”
This is a translation of the homily for the Second Sunday of Advent (year III) in Holmedal Church in Kvinnherad, Norway, Sunday 8th December, 2024. The readings are as follows: Isaiah 2:1-5; Hebrews 10:35-39; and John 16:21-24. When quoting Scripture, I will use the Revised Standard Version of Scripture (RSV), unless otherwise noted.
Collect of the day (translated by yours truly):
Let us Pray:
Faithful God, you have promised that you will never forsake us. We pray: Strengthen us in our faith in your promises, so that we may live and die in the hope of a new heaven and a new earth, through your Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one true God, world without end. Amen.
In the Gospel og John we are presented with seven signs or wonders which show us who Jesus is. Jesus made water into wine, He heals an Official’s Son in Capernaum, He healed a sick man at Bethesda, He fed more than 5000 by the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias, He walked on the water, He healed the man who was born blind, and He raised Lazarus from the dead.1 And after He had given the first sign, He went to Jerusalem and to the temple. We read in John 2:14-17:
In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me.”
For Jesus, the temple was important, because it stood there as a testimony to God, as we have read in the first reading. There, we find a prophecy on the temple: “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.” And at the end: “O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.” The temple was to stand there as a testimony, as a light. But in John 2, we see something interesting.2 After Jesus had driven the money changers out of the temple, many of the Jews spoke up and asked: “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” Jesus answered: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” But how could He do that? The temple had talen forty-six years to build. Could he tear it down and raise it up in three days? We do not know what (or if) Jesus answered, but John the Evangelist adds: “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken.”
Jesus was, ultimately, speaking about Himself. After He was crucified, he lay in the tomb and on the third day, Sunday, He was raised from the dead. And then He had raised the temple again. For the temple, which “shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills,” is Jesus Himself, who is the light of the world. For what is a temple? What makes something a temple? If we read in the dictionary, we see that the main meaning is “an edifice or place dedicated to the service or worship of a deity or deities.” The operating definition is that it is a place of worship. And we see that also in Matthew 21:12-13, where we find another account of Jesus’s cleansing of the temple. There, He quoted Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 7: “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.” What makes a temple a temple is not how large or imposing it is or how long it took to build it, but that it is a place of prayer, a place where God is worshipped. And worship is praising the One we believe is supreme. But we do not believe He is far away, but that he is there, present. And that is precisely what the temple was most of all a sign of: the presence of God. And then we see how important it is what Jesus said. When He says that His own body is God’s temple, He is saying that it is, more than any other place, the place where God is present. And encountering Jesus, we can also say like Isaiah: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.” For the temple was a light for the people of Israel, a concrete testimony to them that God is close to us all. But Jesus is “greater than the temple,” as we see in Matthew 12:6. Her is not just the light of Israel but of the whole world, as He says in John 8:12: “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
And because He is the light of the world, it is in Him we find the centre of everything. It is in Him, in the Son of God, our Lord and Saviour, that we find the centre of our prayers. Through him we can turn to God in prayer. As Jesus tells us in the Gospel reading: “If you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.” Our joy is full, then, when we pray. Because prayer is not primarily about asking for things, because some things we ask for will not be in our best interest and sometimes we ask for completely contradictory things. Some may pray that Liverpool wins the UEFA Champions League, others may pray that Bayer Leverkusen wins. But prayer and worship are primarily about cultivating the presence of God in our lives, seeking Him, turning to Him, and having a relationship with Him. Worship is primarily edifying for us, it is not about everything we should give to God, because we have nothing to give that He has not given us.3 Prayer cannot influence God or change Him, but it can change us, by orienting us towards Him. Prayer does not depict God, for God is in fact incomprehensible to us, but it orients us towards Him. We cannot intellectually grasp what it is about water, bread and wine that can connect us to God, but we can know that Jesus comes to us, completely and fully, when we celebrate baptism or communion. And we cannot grasp intellectually how a human being can be God, but we can still trust that Jesus is God, that His body is the temple of God, that His body is the place where God is present more than any other place, and that it is through Him that we partake of God. As St. Paul puts it in Colossians 2:9-10: “For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”
It is precisely from this relationship that we must understand what prayer is. In a homily on the second Sunday of Advent in 2015, Bishop Halvor Nordhaug said something about this. He said that the promise is our when we pray in Jesus’s name. It belongs within this relation, and it concerns prayers that strengthens this relationship, which connects us closer to God, to our Lord Jesus. A man may say “I will do everything for you” to His beloved, but this must be understood within the context of this relationship of love. It includes what maintains, deepens, and strengthens this relationship. And this is true also of Jesus, who gives us his promise today: “If you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name.”4 We do not know what God is, but we know who God is, for Jesus has shown us who He is. And it is only He, the revealed God, that we can have a relationship with. And therefore we do not speculate about the nature of God. For God is completely incomprehensible to us, he is completely beyond all creation, both reason, being and essence, for he is the source of all this.
But then we can look at what he has done, as Jesus emphasises in John 14:10-11: “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” We can look to the works. And what are these works? First, it is creation itself – everything we see around us – but most importantly it is what God has done for is, as a human. He became flesh for us and for our salvation, as we will celebrate at Christmas, and as we are preparing to celebrate as we process through Advent. And as we will celebrate at the Triduum and at Easter, He suffered and died four our sake, before He rise from the dead, for our sake. For in Him we find the centre, as He Himself says in Joh 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”
That iss actually what the point is today: that God came to us as a human being, as the way, the truth, and the life, so that we could find our way back to God. He did everything for us. He is the One who loved us, who loves us, and says: “I will do everything for you.” And He did, to the full. So therefore we must look to Jesus, look to him who is the temple of God, and say with Isaiah: “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
This is highly inspired by a forthcoming article (in Norwegian): Kjetil Kringlebotten, “Apofasis, teurgi og kristologi: Om delaktigheit i den ukjente Gud” (Teologisk tidsskrift 13:4, 2024): 213-226. The English title is “Apophasis, Theurgy, and Christology: On Participation in the Unknown God.” It will be open access.
Halvor Nordhaug, “Jubileumsgudstjeneste, Arna kirke 150 år” (6th December, 2015). Original quote (which I have paraphrased):
Det er når bønnen er knyttet til navnet Jesus at løftet gjelder. Løftet hører til innenfor dette forholdet, og det gjelder slike bønner som nettopp styrker forholdet, og som knytter oss nærmere til Gud og til Herren Jesus.
Det blir omtrent som når en mann sier til kjæresten sin: «Jeg vil gjøre alt for deg». Det betyr ikke at han verken kan eller vil gjøre hva som helst som hjertedamen skulle finne på, men at han vil gjøre alt det han kan for å ta vare på, utdype og styrke kjærlighetsforholdet mellom de to. I denne rammen gir det mening å si: «Jeg vil gjøre alt for deg».
Det samme gjelder løftet Jesus gir til disiplene: «Hvis dere ber Far om noe, skal han gi dere det i mitt navn».