He didn’t look like them. He didn’t talk like them. He was not part of the crowd that had always held power. Yet he talked about change. And the people listened, and followed.
John the Baptist dressed in camel’s hair and had a leather belt. He didn’t dress like the Scribes, Pharisees and Temple priests. He never was part of that crowd. But John the Baptist talked about change that was certainly coming. The thing is for the change to take place, it was the people who had to change. If there is going to be no more war, then people need to stop hating others. If there is going to be charity and care for all, then people needed to look inside their hearts and pull out the justice of God that resides there. If there is going to be change, then people needed to change.
That is the change we can believe in. “Prepare for the Lord,” John the Baptist proclaims in the Gospel for this Second Sunday of Advent. Prepare for the Lord by preparing yourselves. And the people from throughout the Judean countryside and the inhabitants of Jerusalem went out to the Jordan River where John was preaching. And they confessed their sins. And they were baptized. And the change had begun.
We all want our country and our world to be better. We all want a cure for cancer and AIDS and malnutrition and every ailment or condition that is killing people. We all want the poor to be cared for. We all want an end to violence both that which is carried out by terrorists and that which takes place in every
town and city throughout the world. We all want peace. But what are we doing about it? The heart of John the Baptist’s message is that if we want change, if we really want the One who will reform the world and return mankind to God’s original plan, then we need to change.
This is tough. It is just so much easier to sit back and expect the government to change, the world to change, other people to change. But if we really want change we can believe in, the we need to change.
The Gospel is calling us to look to ourselves. Perhaps someone has mistreated us. We were innocent, and that person attacked us. Maybe it was a parent who constantly belittled us. Maybe it was someone at work or at school who really enjoyed making our life difficult. Perhaps it was someone we barely knew, who took it upon himself or herself to berate us. How have we responded? Sadly, many times I have responded by matching nastiness with nastiness. Perhaps you have too. How can we expect there to be peace in the world, when we respond to hate with hate? If we want the world to change, we need to change.
Perhaps our economic position in life has been rather poor. We shop at discount stores and buy inferior products because we simply can’t afford to buy brand name clothes, brand name food, and so forth. But do we hope that some day we will have so much that we will be able to squander our money? So many professional athletes have given horrible examples of greed. So many are making five million or more and spending ten million or more. Is this our idea of success? Are we looking to ourselves first? How can we expect there to be an end to world poverty when our basic attitude, our deep
hope is to someday be able to be selfish? If we want the world to change, we need to change.
John the Baptist knew that he was striking a chord with people. He saw them responding to his preaching. The Gospel of Luke says that the crowds asked him, “What shall we do?” He said, “If you have two cloaks, give one to someone who has none. Share your food with the hungry.” When the dregs of Jewish society, the tax collectors sincerely asked him, “What shall we do?” he told them to stop cheating people. Even soldiers asked John what they should do. He responded that they stop bullying people and acting unjustly. John wanted to make one thing clear, though: People should not be changing just because they were drawn to his words. He was merely preparing them for the One whose words would be those of the Word of God. “One mightier than me is coming after me.” “I am not worthy to even take off his shoes. What I do is earth bound, I am baptizing with water. What he will do is infinitely beyond the earth. He will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”
Our determination to reform ourselves, to change ourselves so that we can change the world is not merely based on humanitarian needs, but is based on the spiritual. We belong to Jesus Christ. We are His People. He has called us to make His Presence real throughout the world. For us, love is not merely the opposite of hate. Love is the Presence of Jesus Christ within us and among us. For us charity is not just the opposite of greed. Charity is the Lord working through us to care for others.
Every year we priests go on rants about how so much of our society is trying to destroy the original meaning of Christmas. We decry the use of the terms “Holiday Season or Winter Holidays, or Seasons Greetings.” And we should. We are saddened that a spiritual celebration has been transformed into a series of drinking parties. And we should be. But, perhaps, we should all be less concerned with the commercialization of Christmas and the debasement of Christmas from the birth of a poor child in a stable to the celebration of materialism, and be more concerned about what we are doing to Prepare the world for Jesus Christ. What John the Baptist is telling us is to look within, change our own attitudes, and then trust God to allow this change to have a part in the transformation the world.
Change we can believe in will only take place if we are the ones who change. That is what it means to Prepare for the Lord.
THEY CONFESSED THEIR SINS
“The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ.” With this solemn and joyous statement, Mark begins his gospel. Then, suddenly, without any warning, he starts writing about the urgent conversion and repentance from sins that all the people will need to welcome the Messiah and Lord.
It was in the desert that this unusual prophet appeared. He came to prepare the way for the Lord. Such was his job. He addressed himself to everyone’s moral conscience; but he went well beyond that: he had come to prepare the way of the Lord, a very concrete and well defined road that He himself will follow. Jesus knew that many would be disappointed – considering their many conventional expectations about the Messiah.
The people’s reactions to John were moving. According to the evangelist, “all Judaea and all the people of Jerusalem made their way to him, and going into the desert, they listened to him. For the Jews, the desert was a reminder of their fidelity to God, their friend and ally, as well as the best place to attain conversion.
It is in the desert that people learn about their own lives and realize the need for change; they confess their sins, without blaming each other, and they feel the need for salvation. According to Mark, “they confessed their sins” and, John will say, “they were baptized.”
The conversion that our own present Christianity needs cannot be improvised. It requires a long period of recognition and personal work. It will be years before the Church bears witness to the truth so that we all recognize more faithfully that Jesus must be the centre of our Christianity.
Our modern temptation today is this: that we do not want to
go to the desert. We don’t see the need of conversion. We refuse to listen to any voice inviting us to change. Instead, we get busy and distract ourselves with anything – to forget our fears and cover up our lack of courage to embrace the truth about Jesus.
The picture of the Jewish people “confessing their sins” is admirable. Don’t we, modern Christians, need a collective examination of conscience, at all levels, to acknowledge our own errors and sins? Without this confession, can we really prepare the way of the Lord?
PREPARE THE WAY
Advent is a journey, a pilgrimage and we have to know where we are going and what we will need to complete the adventure successfully. Life’s journey, in a way, is an adventure, and the roads are often rough, and the hills to climb steep and the valleys are challenging to cross. Isaiah’s reading is a book of ‘consolation’, while the reading from Mark brings the Good News.
In our modern world we have become accustomed to improved roads; so much so that we pretty much take them for granted. If you are planning to take a trip of a hundred miles or more, probably the least of your concerns is the condition of the roads, except in some weather related sense – ice and snow.
There was, of course, a time when that was not the case. When stagecoaches were the main means of public transportation in the Western United States, passengers were given the choice of first, second or third class seats! How could that be? It was very simple. Whenever the coach came to an impossible place in the road, the first-class passenger could remain seated, the second-class could get out and walk, and the third-class would get out and push! Road conditions were a primary consideration in all travels.
In the times of Christ, the most common mode of traveling was walking. The next most common way to travel was to ride a horse or donkey. When dignitaries or kings had to make a journey, road conditions became a major concern: so they usually hurried to repair them.
Now it is our turn to be prophets. We are called to proclaim the Lord who is mightier than we. We are living in turbulent times. Unemployment is up. The number of people needed to care for the elderly is up. The number of grandparents having full-time responsibility for grandchildren is up. Around the world we see wars and rumors of war. Many people are struck with the sense that their life is not what they expected it to be. We are, in a sense, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” In that situation, religious promises can seem awfully empty. Where is the light that will shine through this darkness? Where are the prophets coming out of the deserts that surround the modern cities and consumer mega-markets?
What are we waiting for? What are you waiting for? The most disastrous answer anyone could give to that question is, “nothing.” It’s the Advent question, boiled clean of all the theology and catechism we were taught and can’t use where the rubber meets the road of life. The problem really lies right here, in that what we really hope and what we expect are two very different things. Oh, sure, we believe we’ll get pie in the sky when we die. God will make everything all right in the end, if we keep the rules and don’t cause too much damage to ourselves and others. What it comes down to is that we’ve come to view the whole enterprise of religion as a severely delayed system of gratification: almost too little, and certainly too late. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Listen to Your Heart! So what’s the answer to the question: What are we waiting for? Our families may be hurting. Our jobs may be killing us. Loneliness makes us feel isolated. We carry the burden of our sick with us. We worry about our children and our elders. Financial trouble may bear down on us. What are we really waiting for?
Listen to your heart – we call this experience hope-against-hope. If we listen to our hopes, instead of to the voice of despair, we experience the meaning of religious faith. We don’t wait for evidence to appear that things will get better. We simply fling all our anticipation in the directions of our heart’s desire and trust that God does too.
Listen to the promises. “Comfort, give comfort to my people” ( Isaiah ). God is in charge and He will fill the valleys and lower the mountains so that the way between God and us is smooth. It has happened so many times in the long history of mankind. Despite the overwhelming evidence of injustice and violence, on this smooth road between God and us, justice and peace shall kiss.
It may be hard for us to see UP this road, because by our nature we are locked into a single moment of time when things seem pretty fixed as they are. But “a day with the Lord is like a thousand years.”
VOICE IN THE DESERT
We don’t known when or how, but one day a village priest called John gave up his temple duties, left Jerusalem and headed for the desert in search of silence and solitude – and listen to God.
In the desert, he would not hear about the Antipas’ plots and he would not be disturbed by temple noise and the shouts of the merchants and landowners of Galilee. As we read in Isaiah, the desert is the best place to open up to God and start one’s conversion. According to the prophet Hosea, God speaks to our hearts in the desert. Is it really possible for us to listen to God in the desert?
In the desert one learns to survive with the essential. There is no room for the superfluous: we hear God’s words much clearer than in the shopping malls! There isn’t time or place for complacency or self-deceit: the desert brings closer to God than any temple could.
When the voice of God reaches us in the desert, we hear it undisturbed by economic, political or religious interests, which, normally, distort everything. It is a clear and distinct voice, that speaks about what is important, and nothing about our own petty disputes, intrigues and strategies.
Normally, essential things are very few, what is strictly necessary. Such, for instance, was John’s message: “Place yourselves before God, and recognize your sin. Don’t trust your innocence. Go to the root.” Each one of us, somehow, is guilty of some of the injustices and selfishness that exist between us. Every believer has something to do with our infidelity to the Gospel.
In the desert, the critical thing is survival. Such was John the Baptist’s message or repentance and forgiveness: “Repent and turn to God”. It was a call to conversion and starting a new life without malice and indifference. Our first responsibility is our own personal transformation, before we can change others to the Gospel.
In the midst of all the agitation, noise, slogans and misinformation of the present world, who will hear the voice from the desert? Who will even try to speak about what is essential? Who will show God’s ways?