Blessed Advent to you all! To mark the season, I’m going to send out something short for each Advent Sunday reflecting on one or more of the prayer book lectionary texts for the day.
Today, I want to talk a little about the Gospel text for Advent I, with some help from Meister Eckhart.1 The prayerbook appoints Matthew 21:1-13, Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, for Advent I. This is not infrequently criticized as proof of the old lectionary’s inadequacy — why are we talking about Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of Advent rather than on Palm Sunday? — but I have been convinced that it is appropriate indeed.2 For what is Advent about if not Christ coming to us? Read allegorically or spiritually, the triumphal entry helps us think about not just Christ’s coming as a baby in Bethlehem or his coming at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, but also his coming into the city or temple of our heart right here and now.3
It’s in this light that I want to turn to Meister Eckhart’s sermon Intravit Jesus in templum dei et ejiciebat omnes vendentes and ementes (Sermon Q 1). In it, Eckhart takes up the very end of the Advent I Gospel reading, Jesus’ entry into the temple and casting out of the money-changers. For Eckhart, the temple is an allegory for the human soul. In that soul, God alone wishes to reign, yet comes and finds it full of money-changers who must be cast out. And who are those money-changers? Eckhart argues that they represent those who do good works for the sake of reward, “so that our Lord might give them something in return, or so that God might do something to please them.”
But Eckhart warns that God does not work this way, that “truth does not like business deals.” Rather, to let God alone reign in the temple of the soul, you must give up the attempt to earn your way into God’s favor with good deeds, all the “fasts, vigils, prayers, and the rest, all kinds of good works” done to make yourself good with God. You must act like God does, seeking nothing for yourself in your works and doing them only for God’s glory. As Eckhart puts it, “If you want to be so completely free of making business deals that God permits you in this temple, you should do everything that you can in all your works purely to praise God, and you should be as empty as that nothing is empty which is neither here nor there.” That is, not only is any attempt at haggling with God via good works to be rejected, but Eckhart even suggests that any sort of self-possessiveness in your works is to be rejected. It is only by moving past the self as asserted over and against God that the soul “enters the unmixed light” and “plunges into its utter nothingness” where Jesus speaks to it and the soul knows “original being in its simple oneness, void of all difference.”
Now, whether or not one finds Eckhart’s rather daring language of the resigned soul’s indistinct union with the Godhead helpful, I think he is onto something very important here. Here is a place where the Rhineland or German mystical tradition (what Bernard McGinn calls the ‘mysticism of the ground’) rhymes with later Protestant thought. For what Eckhart wants to stress is that for Christ to reign in our souls, for him to be worshipped in the temple of our deepest interiority, we must give up all our attempts to make bargains with God, give up any notion of ourselves as being able to make claims upon him by virtue of our powers or capacities or works, be they ever so good. We must surrender ourselves, soul and body, to Christ, throwing ourselves upon his sheer graciousness with no concern for our own merits.
I want to close with perhaps a Reformation twist on Eckhart’s insight here. For Eckhart emphasizes what we need to do for Christ to come to dwell in our temple — even if what we need to do is a sort of self-surrender, self-abandonment. And to be sure, Eckhart believes that such a self-negation is enabled by grace. But while there is certainly room for talk about preparing our hearts for Christ’s coming, in the text in Matthew it is Jesus who is the active agent, not the temple authorities or the money-changers and animal sellers. It is Jesus who purifies the temple of our heart to make it a worthy dwelling for himself. We cannot by our own powers wrest ourselves away from our doomed attempts at earning our righteousness, meriting our salvation. But Jesus can.
And so I cannot imagine a better way to start this season of Advent than to pray that Jesus would indeed do his work in us, that he would restore the temple of our hearts — a temple that is too often left to fall into disrepair, cluttered with idols, full of the money-changers who wish to earn their way into the new life that Jesus wants to freely give. May Jesus come to purify us and drive away from us all that is in opposition to him, that we may rejoice in his present indwelling and look with hope for his return in glory to judge the living and the dead and set all things right.
Or, as the collect for Advent I puts it, Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility, that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.
Paid subscribers might remember that I discussed this sermon awhile ago in a paid post.
Indeed, I that we can go too far in seeing the liturgical year as a precise reenactment of Jesus’ incarnation, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. I think that it is, for example, a mistake to preach Palm Sunday as though the crucifixion is not coming, or the crucifixion as though Easter is not around the corner.
This schema of the threefold coming of Christ dates back at least to Bernard of Clairvaux.