First century Judah was busy bustling and tense. Life went on with Temple and Roman Occupation as dual concerns. And of course, the visible leading players in all of that were Roman soldiers, the priests of the Temple, and the Pharisees. Behind it all was a longing for release, to be free from Roman occupation, for a messiah who would restore the Jewish people to their rightful place in the world. It was a time of great building, and showiness in public and religious life. In many ways it was like living in many places we can think of today. More than anything else, Jews felt incomplete, that their story and their reality did not match.
We can all relate to that in one way or another. And most of us find ourselves drawn to the drama going on in the centres of power in the world, or in our little institutions.

But the gospels for today, and in fact all the gospels, are about something far from the centres of everyday life and power, especially when we look at the end of Jesus’ life. These stories would never have reached the pages of the New York Times or the Guardian had they been around in those days. Not even the Daily Mail. Not facebook. Not tiktok.

The most important of all events was silent and unnoticed.

At the beginning of the first chapter of John we hear that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This word was the light. He came among his own, but they did not recognise him.
In the beginning, was the Word. In those few sentences we know that creation and Jesus are linked. That Jesus is huge. But he came like a Trojan horse of God, incognito, unseen, silently.
As the carols we have just spent weeks singing say:
Silent night. Holy night .
And another:
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv’n! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heav’n. No ear may hear His coming

Then suddenly the gospel moves to today’s reading. We have John the Baptist and Jesus crossing paths. These are two men, ordinary men, on the outside, without power or status or privilege, though one was distinctly odd, both with deep spiritual calling, and they are passing each other. They are cousins. I have always found this passage strange. Why didn’t they embrace. Instead the gospel says John noted to his friends, that the Lamb of God had just passed. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Just like that.

John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, who we know is not much older than Jesus and seems not to know him well, does spiritually recognise him in this passage, because of the dove at baptism. The dove was a sign from God, of the Word, a sign of messiahship, a sign of God’s presence. Apart from this sign and this spiritual discernment, Jesus looks just like any other man.
If we try to get outside the layers of familiarity this story has for us, it is very strange. So much depends upon it, upon this deep spiritual recognition John has of Jesus.

The Bible is full of signs, signs that people and especially prophets seem to understand. Instinctively. Spiritually. The Bible can be read in a superficial way as though it were just a collection of facts and events, but its real discourse is this deep interaction with signs of spirit, signs of God.

Those signs turned out to be of lasting and everlasting importance. The politics and Temple life of the day have been forgotten. The Temple would lie in ruins just 40 years later. The Roman empire would eventually fall. Others have come and gone. But we still tell the story of Jesus.

We take it for granted when we read the Bible, that shepherds would heed the call of an angel, that Joseph would remember his dreams, that a virgin would talk to Gabriel, that wandering astrologers would follow a star, that a cousin would see a dove descend on a man at baptism, but most of us don’t expect to find or see these signs in the world ourselves. We don’t expect to follow a star, or a cloud, or take our dreams too seriously.

It is not as though our lives are not full of signs. They are. Every word, every image is a sign, but they are all arbitrary. And we know what they mean by convention.
We name our children because we like the sound of their names, or sometimes the meaning. Sometimes they go on to rename themselves. This is a very unbiblical thing to do in a world where we have the idea that God names us while we are still in the womb.
That the law is written in our hearts, and that God puts a song on our lips. The first thing Jesus does is rename Simon as Cephas.
Names are so important to Jews that they do not say the name of God directly. Instead of Yahweh we get hashem, the name, or Adonai, Lord.

In the Bible God names, and signs of spirit are everywhere. And they are always full of meaning.
We don’t need any spiritual reserve or capacity to understand our ordinary language. But we do for the signs of God.

John the Baptist saw his life’s work as pointing to the sign of God, in his cousin Jesus. The gospel writers saw their task as pointing to the same sign of God, in the flesh. Silently come among us.

The Bible invites us all, even in our sophisticated, cynical late modern world, into the world of signs and mystery. First of all to recognize Jesus as the sign of God, even from the distance of 2000 years. And to recognize this because our hearts are moved by Spirit to see.
A spiritual sign is deep enough that we don’t want to move on. We have to stay with it a while.
Which is why the orthodox have icons. They aren’t part of the background, like our saints, they are central, to be participated in, meditated on.

One of the places we are beginning to see the signs of God in again is the natural world. We are meant to read nature, but with spiritual eyes.
In a novel I have read recently, Held, a widow says that she has learned now how to read the signs of her deceased partner’s presence
A flicker of light between the trees
A bird sitting for long minutes beside me on a tree, unafraid.

I have also been reading several unrelated books about spiritual senses. One is a book on Clement, a late first century pope and Church father, who believed that the way to understand God was through the disciplines that study the natural world, what we would call science, but only interpreted in the spirit. So we go to nature and reflect on it and notice it and see its patterns and its signs, and even come to conclusions but somewhere in that contemplation, God meets us and gives us also a divine perspective on what we see. So that contemplation of nature can never be separated from this connection to God. This is very different from observation of nature as an exercise in separation from God.

Sarah Coakley also talks about how we keep trying to understand Jesus from a human historical perspective, but the more we concentrate on that, the less we understand what the sign of Jesus really is for us. We have to receive this man, this sign of God, with spiritual resources, spiritual senses, in the same way that John the Baptist did 2000 years ago.

Communion is meant to be the ultimate sign of God for us, but we are too used to it. Someone once said that we participate in this faithfully, and every now and then it shakes us and convicts us deeply. Every now and then we reach beyond the simple act of moving forward and eating bread and drinking wine. Every now and then, our brokenness matches the brokenness of Jesus, and we are transformed.

What does all of this mean for us? We too are meant to move in the world as more or less silent signs of God. Not in the sense of being silent. Just in the sense of moving sideways from the power structures, from what is visible that seems to matter in our time. We too live in a world in which empires are emerging and collapsing, in which many people live in fear of tyranny, in which loud and dramatic actions point to themselves and their power.
It seems in this world that the armies and bombs are the only power in the world. And they can terrify us and even harm us, but what will really endure are the simple and silent signs of God that endure, like love and light and hope, like sharing and forgiveness and peace. Like the natural world turned toward God, and revealing God’s presence to us. That’s all we have to do really in one way. Just be quietly present, notice and receive.
So, as Lent approaches, we might think about this type of contemplation of our lives and of nature as a form of prayer. How can we learn to notice and to listen to the silent signs of God amongst us today? How can we spend more time in contemplation of the biblical story, and of God at work in the work of the world and its creatures?