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Second Sunday of Advent
December 10 2024
Comfort, give comfort to my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her
that her service is at an end,
her guilt is expiated;
indeed, she has received from the hand of the Lord
double for all her sins.
A voice cries out:
In the desert prepare the way of the Lord!
Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be filled in,
every mountain and hill shall be made low;
the rugged land shall be made a plain,
the rough country, a broad valley.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Go up on to a high mountain,
Zion, herald of glad tidings;
cry out at the top of your voice,
Jerusalem, herald of good news!
Fear not to cry out
and say to the cities of Judah:
Here is your God!
Here comes with power
the Lord God,
who rules by his strong arm;
here is his reward with him,
his recompense before him.
Like a shepherd he feeds his flock;
in his arms he gathers the lambs,
carrying them in his bosom,
and leading the ewes with care.
R. (8) Lord, let us see your kindness, and grant us your salvation.
I will hear what God proclaims;
the Lord—for he proclaims peace to his people.
Near indeed is his salvation to those who fear him,
glory dwelling in our land.
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
and justice shall look down from heaven.
The Lord himself will give his benefits;
our land shall yield its increase.
Justice shall walk before him,
and prepare the way of his steps.
Do not ignore this one fact, beloved,
that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years
and a thousand years like one day.
The Lord does not delay his promise, as some regard “delay,”
but he is patient with you,
not wishing that any should perish
but that all should come to repentance.
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief,
and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar
and the elements will be dissolved by fire,
and the earth and everything done on it will be found out.
Since everything is to be dissolved in this way,
what sort of persons ought you to be,
conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion,
waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God,
because of which the heavens will be dissolved in flames
and the elements melted by fire.
But according to his promise
we await new heavens and a new earth
in which righteousness dwells.
Therefore, beloved, since you await these things,
be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
John the Baptist appeared in the desert
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River
as they acknowledged their sins.
John was clothed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist.
He fed on locusts and wild honey.
And this is what he proclaimed: “One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
THE MYTH OF JOHN THE BAPTISER
We probably all accept that there is a genuine historical foundation behind the story of a prophetic figure who lived alone in the Judean wilderness, a stretch of barren, rocky hills between Jerusalem and Jericho. For a short time people came in crowds to hear his fiery denunciations of the hypocritcal leaders of the day with their legalistic moral standards. Eventually he lost his head over it.
However we can also approach the story as the myth it has become (or always was), in order to mine its religious significance and its spiritual meaning. Clearly it is not just a fable made up for entertainment-telling around the fireside. Its purpose is more serious. It is told and retold to convey truths that are hard to explain in plain language, things that are better expressed in poetry, pictures or stories. Life's spiritual journey is one such; any explaination has to be done through metaphors because the spirit ual life is beyond the reach of sight or touch or taste, the stuff of the physical sciences.
Every myth is like a multi-faceted crystal. To peer into its depth w need to choose one facet at a time, and in this short reflection we will allow ourselves to wonder what is the significance of John's experience in the desert.
A desert experience stands at the start of every spiritual journey. It's because we feel hungry that we look for food. We don't walk hours to water unless we're thirsty. Experiences in the spiritual journey are parallel to those of day to day life; all kinds of things can distract us from basic needs. We easily fall into the trap of non-healthy foods and drinks. A person can even starve amid plenty. We have alcohol free days or months to give our system a chance to clean out the toxins. In the spiritual journey we go to the 'desert' to focus on the inner self and experience its hunger for wholeness.
In the spiritual journey a retreat into a desert is a time where, in your aloneness, you are aware only of the Presence. There, in the stillness of the early morning, in the shimmering heat of midday, in the cool breeze at eventide, in the blaze of stars on a moonless night, you hear a fluttering of the wings of the Spirit and you remember the Bible's opening words: “...the spirit hovered over the void.” In the emptiness you become aware of The Presence in whom you live and breathe, the ground of your being.
Religious (the ones who live in communities and dress a bit different to ordinary folk, even today) make a week-long retreat like this every year. It's strange to realise that, looking back over 80 years, among so many memories the many retreats stand out for me. At the time they were mostly a battle against nature and a struggle to keep focus, yet something was going on at depth, something that still echoes in my memory. Eventually you find that awareness of the Presence has become constant, effortless. It is just there. Awareness of the Presence is sharpened now in moments of special joy or upsetting troubles. The Liturgy offers 'desert time' as we approach the great moments that reveal the Mystery's Presence and Action in us. Now is the time to focus anew on the coming of the Divine into our lives.
The coming of one who would free us holds the promise of enlightenment. “A people that lived in darkness have seen a great light...” (Vigil Mass at Christmas.)
Everyone's life should reach a level of completeness. The journey of becoming complete or “fully alive” proceeds by a series of discoveries that uncover deep mysterious movements within us. They are deep because they are at the very core of our being; they are mysterious because they are sacred, divine. The ground of our being, Being Itself, the God we seek, we find inside our self. “The kingdom of 'Heaven' is within you.” For anyone to reach the end of their time and not have become aware of their spirit-side or spirit-depth is the greatest tragedy, a hell of a failure. I don't believe that many fail in fact, though we are right to worry that so many don't seem to care at all about life's values. Life itself is bigger than our insousiance and has its own way of bringing every one to their senses.
Maybe you've got to have known some “failures” to see that glimmer of awareness shining, faintly but enough. Sometimes it shines most brightly in our darkest falls. Perhaps not many people are completely lost – in “Hell”. Perhaps none at all, but we are right to fear the possibility and to put ourselves to work seriously on developing that awareness or sense of the spirit that will make us able to know ourselves and to help others. The hope of the world rests on the sturdy foundation of those who know themselves and their destiny and refuse to be discouraged or overcome by fear. The God, whose coming we are preparing for, is the ground of our being and has to be recognised as such.
In the desert John experienced his own poverty. Moving down to the river he began to speak truth to the people at large and to the powerful who controlled the smallest details of the peoples' lives. Jeshua too was concerned to make the world a better place. He too began his mission with a desert experience in which he found himself tempted in three different ways: welfare, fame, power. He could take care of the needs of the people by working wonders for them; he could achieve fame by taking risks and performing stunts to give authority to his words; or he could sell his soul to the political powers that run the world and give homage to its master. As we know he resisted each with an appropriate reference to faith/trust in the true God.
While John delivered fiery sermons, Jeshua's approach was to share his experience of the journey. He took people along with him. After his baptism, when he noticed two men (according to the fourth gospel) following him along the riverbank, he turned and asked them: “What do you want?” In their embarrassment they stuttered: “Teacher, where do you live?” “Come and see,” was his open-hearted response. They even stayed for a couple of days. Jeshua did not drag a bunch of wide-eyed first year undergraduates around the country in his wake. He picked out a team of mature adults, a team outstanding only for its extremely varied composition. He shared his thoughts and himself with them until they became friends, “because I have told you everything that is in my heart.”
Any one of us can say: I can lead others to take an interest in the spiritual journey only insofar as I share my own experience. In reading these halting phrases and jumbled paragraphs you are joining me for a short stage in my search. Puzzle with me over the metaphors (regularly found in the parables of Jeshua) and find your own understanding of what they mean. Come with me as I retreat into the desert with John, where we will experience the hunger of humankind – a hunger for someone to save us from ourselves. As the good hope dwells in our individual hearts or it is nowhere, so too the bad, the wrong desires left uncontrolled, the wrong ambitions left unchecked, the resentful attitude allowed to fester into anger and even bloodshed – the bad is found in us. 'Wash me, Lord, and I shall be clean!'
John called on people to start changing their way of seeing life's meaning and the way to live it. It's not a one-off step, but a journey of ten thousand steps over decades. The changing is never done. 'A baptism of penance for the forgiveness of sins' the current translations still stammer. Closer might be 'a baptism/washing/drowning of the ego for the absolving/dissolving/washing away of the stains of sin, as first step in starting of a new life.'
The changing is never done. Whether you're 25 or 85, each day is another stage to work through, and it always entails a desert experience, the essential prelude to ongoing metanoia. You cannot catch a quantity of light and keep it for another day. Light is a movement of photons, a flow or a wave movement, always being produced and flowing outwards. So too enlightenment in things of the spirit is produced anew at every moment, which means that we need to be alert and watchful with open eyes, an open mind and open heart. Alertness to the spirit can become habitual; it is guaranteed if we keep trying. “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” To ask, to seek, to knock, we need first to experience our need, our loss, our loneliness as we stand outside a door that seems closed against us. We need desert time.
The larger-than-life, mythic figure of John the Baptiser tells of the stirring that desert time can make happen in us.
Footnote: The “desert” is a primary symbol that points to an incapacity, even a barrenness, within which we only dimly sense as we make exhausting efforts to take flight and conquer the world. In our youth we are invincible but all too soon we fall on our face. At first it seems we should jump up and charge on regardless of the humiliation. But instead, perhaps we should stay down while we work out what went wrong. We made a mistake. We're not as smart as we thought we were. We've been kidding our self. This devastating self-discovery is a desert experience.