“Are you the one or are we to look for another?”

“Are you the one or are we to look for another?”
Sunday 14 December 2025

A sermon by Kenneth Padley

One of the most dramatic parts of the cathedral’s Darkness to Light Advent service comes when the six banners carried in procession are flipped from front to back and words of hope on one side are asserted on the other as finding resolution in Jesus. It is a moment of culmination after an extraordinary act of worship which pivots forwards and backwards across the ages. Each section of Darkness to Light is introduced by one of the Advent Antiphons, sentences of longing, hauntingly sung from the western gallery, piercing the gloom and unknown future. Each antiphon is then expanded by a pair of readings, one written before the time of Jesus and one after. Finally, each pair of readings is followed by a magnificent choral work to unpack the imagery of the antiphon in the life of Jesus and his mother Mary. Among the antiphons:

• we hear about Wisdom, coming from God’s mouth, ordering all things and teaching prudence;
• we hear about the Dayspring, a new star or sun bringing life and enlightenment;
• we hear about the Key of David, a royal figure unlocking justice;
• we hear about the Virgin and the divine mystery of incarnation;
• and we hear about Emmanuel, God with us, salvation for the problems of the world.

I have now done a dozen tours of duty through the Darkness to Light service – a lot fewer than many others I admit. Yet each time I experience the service, I have a growing appreciation of the patterns of expectation and fulfilment which structure it.

Expectation and fulfilment, however, are problematic. Christians say that Jesus is the end of our longing. So why do we bother with Advent? Year after year we repeat the same cycle. If Jesus is culmination, why should we revert to exploring the emotions of expectation?

I wonder if we have this need because – despite all that we know of Jesus – we know also that the world is still broken.

• We know this as corporate reality from the news – wars and natural disasters just as bad as in Jesus’ day.
• And we know this as existential reality, individuals wracked by pain, loss and despondency.

As the carol puts it, beneath the angel strain have rolled / two thousand years of wrong.

So have we been deceived? Is Jesus really the fulfilment of our desires or, in the question of John the Baptist, ‘are we to look for another’?

Let’s drill into this dilemma by taking a closer look at one of those Advent antiphons, the antiphon called ‘O Adonai’. Adonai is a Hebrew word used as a substitute in the Jewish tradition to avoid uttering the name of God. When the Lord appears to Moses through the burning bush of Exodus chapter 3 he says that he is sheer self-existence: ‘I am who I am’. Our Jewish brothers and sisters consider the four-letter Hebrew word used here to be so holy that, when they read ‘I am’, they say instead ‘Adonai’.

This means that ‘Adonai’ is both a veil and a trumpet, a device which paradoxically magnifies that which is hidden. These complexities are beautifully captured by American Episcopalian priest, Regina Walton in her poems about the antiphons. Writing on Adonai, Walton traces the hand of God on the life of Moses and the Hebrews’ flight from Egypt, expectation of a promise that seems just beyond their grasp, never quite reaching fulfilment:

Shield against the name given of fire –
Beyond comprehension or captivity,
The use and power of names.
Adonai – what we call you because
The truth of redemption weighs heavily on us –
The smoking mountain, the plagues, the sea’s retraction,
Cloud and pillar, bread-speckled desert,
Land of milk and honey and the taste of blood –
All this your Name contains,
Spoken and unspoken at once.

Base of creation, vessel of remembrance
For a hundred billion lost tongues,
I AM, so we are
Momentary embers.

But Adonai, you privilege your clay:
You appeared once in a thicket of scrub-bush aflame –
You gave the Way so our burning
Would not consume us –
Come and deliver us again
Into your wilderness.[1]

‘Come and deliver us again / Into your wilderness.’ For Regina Walton, the end of the antiphon is not sweetness and light, but the desert. The advent of Adonai to you and to me draws us into a place of lack and challenge – just as happened to the Hebrews when Moses obeyed the burning bush, just as happened to Jesus after his baptism.

The everyday reality of this is expressed in a painting of Moses’ encounter with Adonai by seventeenth-century Italian Domenichino. Most artists depict the burning bush against a barren backdrop. Domenichino, by contrast, sets the encounter in his native Italy. Moses and the bush are in the foreground, and behind are mountains with verdant trees and a little castle beside a lake. Jane Williams writes of this painting ‘This happens to be Moses’ encounter with the divine power, but it is happening in Domenichino’s time and country. This happens to be God’s call to Moses to fulfil his particular vocation, but, by implication, the burning bush awaits any of us: we might come upon our encounter with God and God’s call on our lives anywhere.’[2]

So Advent summons us back through the cycle of expectation and fulfilment not because Jesus has failed but because encounter with God is ongoing and personal. This season is a reminder of our lifelong need for attentiveness, a quality enjoined RS Thomas as he contemplates The Bright Field:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush…

Christ’s life (and death – and new life) make all the difference to our destiny. But as the ancient people of Adonai knew, this does not make the journey easy. The victory of Christ has yet to transport us out of worldly conflict and suffering. And so each Advent we renew our expectation, until that day when the naught-consuming fire of the Lord burns in all its fulness.

[1] Walton, The Yearning Life (Brewster, MA: Paraclete, 2016), 69.

[2] Williams, Art of Advent (London: SPCK, 2018), 81.