I concluded my preaching for the First Sunday of Advent with these words: “The knowledge that Christ is always the coming one is why Christianity is at its heart a holy mystery, shrouded at every turn and in all things by mystery. The holy 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 mystery of Jesus Christ: celebrating, savoring, and wondering at our Lord Jesus, Who comes to us through the Holy Spirit: living and moving and having our being within the Kingdom of God.”

Advent as a whole is about looking for God’s coming now in our souls by grace, to quicken and heighten our awareness of His presence here and now. After seeing on Advent’s First Sunday how Our Lord’s entrance into Jerusalem represents His desire to enter our heart through preaching of the apostles and drive out from His Temple (which is us) all that is not prayer, it is fitting that the Second Sunday of Advent is particularly given over to celebrating, savoring, and wondering at the fact that Christ always seeks to come to us, to come into His Temple which is us, through Holy Scripture—as Saint Paul says, how Scripture, previously veiled and not able to be fully understood, is now unveiled by Jesus Christ through the Cross.

This is why we have the Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, a famous and beautiful Anglican collect, which I will read again: “Blessed Lord, Who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: grant that we may in such wise (wise is the old word for way: that we may in such way) hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of Thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which Thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.”

So much in this Collect. Through the Scriptures, inwardly digested, Christ is known. He is known, in our Lord’s words in our Gospel passage, “with power and great glory.” Indeed, Christ took on our human nature in significant part because in doing so He would be powerfully and profoundly known through the opening of Scripture: the opening of it, and our reception of Him, inwardly digesting Him because as He said, “I am the Bread of life.” This Bread, our daily bread, is received both through opening Scripture and by the breaking of bread. And we know Christ, the Eternal Word of God, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, took on our human nature to be known and received as our daily Bread because on the very day of His Resurrection, He taught the disciples to interpret Scripture as always concerning Him and to receive Him in the Eucharist. He taught them to seek Him so fervently that despite heaven and earth passing away, His words are so digested so as to never pass away.

This gives the interpretation of Paul’s teaching in our Romans epistle: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction.” What kind of instruction? Paul specifies and says, “that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” Because Christ is our hope, then we are to read Scripture to know Christ in the Scriptures, and in knowing Him in Scripture, we may together with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, Paul says that Christ took on our human nature, the nature of a servant, to show the truthfulness of God the Father. In reading Scripture – in marking, learning, and inwardly digesting Christ as He is known through Scripture – the root of Jesse will come, and through His coming by the opening of Scripture, the God of hope will fill us with joy and peace, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, we may abound in hope.

Let us “inwardly digest” Christ through Scripture. The Anglican Divine blessed John Keble has this to say about “inwardly digesting”: “When something is digested, it agrees with him, nourishes him, is changed, as it ought to be, into the substance of his body. So the word and commandments of God, made known in Holy Scripture, are inwardly digested, when a man so receives them, as that they shall enter into his character, become, as it were, part of himself. How may that be? There is but one way. We must actually do as God bids us.” In the words of Saint James, we must not only be hearers of the Word, but doers of the Word. To be a doer of what God commands us to do, and what He reveals of His Son through Scripture as our daily bread, is what it means to inwardly digest. Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction – our instruction in how to pray, how to love, how to worship, how to be humble, how to be a disciple, how to live a godly life of Scripture and Sacraments through the Liturgy: how to live, so as to be taken up into the life of the Holy Spirit, as He teaches us all things and guides us into the Truth Who is Jesus as He seeks to come to us and be known through the opening of Scripture and the Breaking of Bread: He who lives and reigns with the Father in the unity of the same Holy Spirit: ever one God, world without end. Amen.

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