In the run-up to Christmas there are always secrets, nice secrets – things we may be planning to give to one another that must be discreetly hidden, seldom opened cupboards found ajar that we should refrain from investigating too closely, questions we know we shouldn’t press. If the secret is ours, we may drop a hint to raise the level of excited anticipation without actually giving the game away. Reading the Advent prophecies is a bit like that. We enjoy the sense of being in on the secret, the satisfaction of knowing what the prophet is struggling to express in metaphor and picture language, as his intuitive understanding is stretched to the limit.
I want to suggest this morning that prophecy remains delightfully open-ended, open to new interpretations, new insights, even when it seems to have been fulfilled. Let us start with Malachi. The context suggests that the message is essentially one of purification, cleansing. When the people of Israel, weary of the long struggle to rebuild and restore Jerusalem after their return from exile, complain that God has failed to bring about the vindication of their cause, Malachi is moved to prophesy a great and terrible day of divine judgment, fiercer than they had bargained for, to be ushered in by a reappearance of Elijah, sent by a merciful God to warn and save them. Purification is what fire does to the impurities in gold and silver, or what fuller’s soap does to the dirt in the washing. In his own time Malachi’s prophecy seems to have been understood as looking forward to a deepening of temple worship under a reformed Levitic priesthood. But such a prophecy of cleansing and purification might equally find fulfilment at the very end of time, on that great and terrible day of the Lord, to which he refers. And the New Testament sees signs of its fulfilment in the mission of John the Baptist, who comes like a latter-day Elijah to prepare the way for Jesus by preaching repentance for the cleansing of sins. The text of Handel’s Messiah follows this same tradition in using these verses as a kind of prologue, setting the scene for the narrative of our salvation. Last week, however, when the celebrated potter Edmund de Waal chose the aria ‘For He is like a refiner’s fire’ as one of his Desert Island Discs, his choice was dictated not so much by its theme of purification as by the concept of transformation, the transformation which takes the clay he places in the kiln – his equivalent of the refiner’s fire – and turns it into the work of art which emerges, recognisably the same and yet infinitely more beautiful. I think that’s a wonderful way to suggest what Malachi’s prophecy might mean if applied to ourselves at the second coming of Christ in judgment. What riches there are in these four short verses of prophecy.
We could apply a similar analysis to the prophecy from Isaiah in our Gospel reading. In its original context it pictured the great processional way in Babylon as being extended hundreds of miles across the desert like the building of a great motorway to ease the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. Luke sees in it a prophecy of the mission of John the Baptist, preparing the way for the coming of Christ, but it also looks forward to Christ’s final triumph when all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
So what are we to make of prophecies which are legitimately open to so many interpretations? Amidst so much confusion and uncertainty, where are we to look for the truth? Does such diversity of interpretation make all prophecy utterly unknowable until we can read it with the benefit of hindsight? There is no doubt that in this life we have to live with much uncertainty. As St Paul reminds us elsewhere, now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror – the mirrors he knew were not very good – only at the end of time shall we see clearly, face to face. Prophecies will cease to have any meaning, even knowledge will vanish. Both are incomplete, they get us only so far towards the truth. But that does not mean we can give up. It is better to walk by the light of a single candle than to stumble about in total darkness. And the prophets do help us to discern the dim outlines of the truth, even if there is so much more to be revealed when we step through, as one day we shall, into the brighter light of everlasting day. In Israel’s darkest days prophets like Isaiah and Malachi could still see signs of a God who was not only terrifyingly pure and holy – who can endure the day of his coming? – but also forever faithful to the terms of his promise that he would be their god and they would be his people. God’s fearful justice could not be ignored, but it was always tempered by mercy, welling up from the faithfulness of his love, and leading ultimately through repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation to that harmony between God and his people that Malachi expresses in terms of an offering presented to the Lord in righteousness, pleasing to him as in the days of old.
Such a vision must have kindled a spark of hope in the weary downtrodden people to whom it was addressed. Why else would anyone have bothered to preserve it? But the truth about God’s love for his people turned out to be yet more wonderful than Malachi or any of the prophets had dared to hope. None could fully anticipate what God would do in and through his Son Jesus Christ to effect the true reconciliation which our stubbornness and pride had resisted for so long. The life-changing difference is immediately apparent from the way St Paul, writing to the Christians at Philippi, can pray that their love and compassion, for which he gives joyful thanks, will overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight, enabling them to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ they may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. There are moments when Paul speaks with the authentic voice of prophetic insight, and this is surely one of them. See how the love of God has banished the fear that was bound up with Malachi’s vision of a great and terrible day of the Lord.
We have seen, I hope, how open-ended prophecy is. If it helps us to see into the future at all, it is because the prophet is inspired to look beneath the deceptively solid surface of the world as we know it, to reveal something of the real world as God knows it. As we read the prophecies that prepare us for the first coming of Christ, we see that in Jesus the truth turned out to be a more wonderful fulfilment than anyone could have imagined. So it is, as we read the more troubling, darker prophecies about that other Advent, Christ’s second coming in judgment, that I believe and trust, within the love of God, that our experience on that day, however searingly painful, will again turn out to be more wonderful than anything the prophets of the Old Testament or the New have taught us either to fear or to hope for.