The Abyss of Light

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudate Sunday)

14 December 2025, St Bene’t’s Cambridge

Matthew 11.2–11

The first confession I ever took as a priest was at a women’s prison in Oaxaca, Mexico.

It was a very  different sort of prison from the ones of my American imagination ; in Oaxaca, the women’s prison built around an extended, three-sided courtyard filled with tables and lean-to’s where prisoners made trinkets, mended clothes, or cooked food; enterprises to be sold to folks on the outside, in order to feed themselves and support their families.

Very young children ran about or napped in the shade, living with their mothers. Trade, music, and family meant that the prison extended beyond the chain link fence and barbed wire into the surrounding neighbourhood —  what in Brazil would be called a favela, but in Mexico is a colonia popular or even a ciudad perdida, a lost city.

It was not a romantic prison — hunger, desperate poverty, abuse, neglect, and exploitation were all rife. But it was, economically and socially, though of course not literally, a permeable prison.

 Perhaps the same was true in some ways for John the Baptist’s prison. John was imprisoned for criticising the marriage of Herod to Herodias, the ex-wife of his half-brother Herod II, her uncle.

(Evidently a royal family who saved their imagination for intrigue rather than spend it on original names)

I keep imagining John the Baptist as a lone prophet in a dungeon cell, like Elijah in his cave, cut off from the world. Yet the Gospels tell us he was able to communicate with his disciples.

 But he was no longer on the banks of the fast-flowing River Jordan, beneath the poplars and willows and tamarisk trees. Now John found himself languishing in Machaerus, Herod’s great fortress and prison, on a steep hilltop overlooking the eastern bank of the Dead Sea. The Sword, Machaerus means in Ancient Greek, and indeed the sword would be the death of John the Baptist.

 When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to Jesus,

          ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ (Matt. 11.2-3)

It’s a heartbreaking moment in the Gospels. John of the wilderness, John of wild locusts and honey and the cool-flowing river, the noonday light through the willow leaves, and the ice-bright stars of cold desert nights…all but extinguished as he languished in prison for preaching truth to power.

And there in the darkness, awaiting the death he knows is to come sooner or later, he sends his disciples to find Jesus and ask: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

As the psalmist cries, How long, O Lord?        (Ps 13.1)

Our sermons this Advent are on Hope — and no, the vicar hasn’t forgotten that it is Gaudate Sunday, the Advent Sunday of Rejoicing. For one, the rose-coloured vestments are hard to miss!

But what is it to talk about Hope when we’re rejoicing, unless we first look to John struggling to hope from the depths of prison.

The first sermon I ever heard at St Bene’t’s was when Anna Matthews preached a characteristically brilliant sermon on John the Baptist.  It was John’s Nativity, 24 June — a date, as Anna pointed out to us, when the days begins to diminish, as on Christ’s Nativity falls in December when days begins to increase: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn 3.30)

Of course, in John’s Gospel at that point of that remark by John, the baptiser is at Aenon near Salim and not yet in prison.

Now, though, the darkness is clearly closing in and John’s exhaustion, worry, and darkness seem to weigh down his words: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

Have you ever waited beyond hoping? And I don’t mean for British Rail, but those dark times on a hospital ward, or staring at the phone willing it to ring, or praying that it won’t, or looking out from a shadowed valley of grief or a prison of addiction, or wrestling with God in prayer at two in the morning, wrestling with silence at three in the morning.

Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

We live with our fragile bodies, our delicately-balanced minds, our deep-bruised hearts, and a world of flood, fire, and failures. We live with shadows and deep darkness and wounds we can hardly bear to look at.

But we know now the answer to John’s question: the Messiah had come, but as one who would be broken on the cross, and in dying would overcome even death itself, still bearing his wounds, God whose healing love was made manifest in his dis-abled pierced hands and feet:

Go and tell John what you hear and see

Tell him that lives are transformed, good news is brought, the dead raised to life! Tell him yes the blind given sight, and, as we would come know, saints like Margaret of Castello who remained blind and lame all her life, St Paul with his thorn in the flesh, Margery Kempe with her gift of tears, St Francis with his sigmata, unable to walk without agony, unable to bear the sun’s bright light even as he wrote his Canticle of the Sun, all of them calling out across the generations to sing:

Go and tell John what you hear and see.

And John heard, and he saw, there his prison cell and knew at the last the “the abyss of light”           — that wonderful phrase of St Francis’ biographer — that in the very hour of darkness, God draws us — neither down nor up nor any cardinal direction of this world — God draws us in (and up and down and out, all at once) to “the abyss of infinite divine goodness”

(the phrase is from Chapter 9,  The Little Flowers of St. Francis)

 We are not called to run away from pain — our own or that of others. We are not called to imagine that Christian holiness can only be seen in physical wholeness. We are not called to rejoice because we have wealth or power or privilege; but to rejoice because, like Mary, sorrows pierce our heart, to rejoice because, like John, we are imprisoned for the sake of the Gospel to rejoice in the abyss of light even when the darkness looms, that like the desert and dry land in Isaiah’s prophesy we might “rejoice with joy and singing.”  (Isa. 35.1-2)

In the words of the old hymn:

What tho' my joys and comforts die?    The Lord my Saviour liveth;

  What tho' the darkness gather round?    Songs in the night he giveth.

  No storm can shake my inmost calm   While to that refuge clinging;

  Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,   How can we keep from singing?

(‘How can I keep from singing?’, lyrics either anon or Anna Barlett Warner)