Second Sunday of Advent

Dominica II Adventus B
10 December 2023

 If you can recall how Advent started with last Sunday’s Gospel passage, you might be experiencing some “evangelical whiplash”.  A new liturgical year, a new season, began last Sunday with Advent.  Yet, that weekend’s Gospel was a selection more toward the end of St. Mark’s Gospel and maintained the theme of the coming judgement with the awaited return of the Lord in glory.  This Sunday’s Gospel selection sort of violently throws us back to the opposite pole of Advent.  The selection comes from the first verses of St. Mark’s Gospel and it seems more “advent-y” since we hear of the great Advent figure of St. John the Baptist, and the call to prepare the way of the Lord.  We are back to the beginnings with the Gospel selection this weekend and that can serve as a theme for us and the spiritual renewal we need in Advent to prepare anew the way of the Lord in our own daily lives, in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

It is clear from the Gospel selection that something about St. John the Baptist’s location, his proclamation, and his appearance hit a nerve such that great numbers of people were coming out to him.  The Gospel tells us that St. John appeared “in the desert” and that he was baptizing people “in the Jordan River.”  The details of St. John’s location can serve as signals that pointed Jews of his time back to the Exodus.  When God began to execute that foundational saving event of the Exodus by bringing His people out of Egypt, where did the Hebrew people go?  They went out into the desert.  They journeyed there 40 years as God sought to train them to break their connection to Egypt, to be trained in His law, and to move away from slavery and toward the Promised Land.  And where did the Exodus end?  It ended at the Jordan River as the twelve tribes crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land.  We can say that the action of St. John is equivalent to calling Jews back to the beginnings of their foundational experience of salvation in the Exodus.  St. John’s preaching and administering of a baptism of repentance at the Jordan River can serve to call God’s people back to this pivotal place in their history and, at the same time, to announce that a new exodus is arriving.  This gospel scene is an opportunity for God’s people to be renewed in their covenant so that they are ready for how God will still fulfill His promises and more perfectly bring about redemption by the arrival of the “one mightier” than St. John, who is to come.  And no surprise, then, that if you read further into the Gospels after Jesus has engaged in his preaching and is nearing his arrival in Jerusalem for crucifixion, that event is marked by the imagery of Passover and exodus.  In fact, St. Luke in the Transfiguration account even indicates that Moses and Elijah appear alongside Jesus speaking to him about his exodus (Lk. 9:30-31).

The ministry of St. John called multitudes back to their beginnings to be renewed in repentance and the forgiveness of sins, so that they would be prepared for the new thing God desired to do by His sacrifice on the Cross and his passage, as through the Red Sea or the veil torn open in the Temple, ushering the way into the everlasting promised land of heaven.  The Gospel selection likewise serves as a call to us to return to our beginnings when we were brought out of slavery to sin, passing through the waters of baptism, and given the hope of crossing that final Jordan into heaven.  We exist in the time of the new exodus accomplished by Jesus.  We have been brought into that most perfect covenant of salvation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We have been redeemed.  Yet, like God’s people returning time and again to the poison of Egypt, we are inclined to sin and struggle to remain alive and faithful to the New Covenant.  We also need to go back to our beginnings. We also need to hear the call to repentance.  We also need the forgiveness of our sins.  We also need to respond in great multitudes to this urgent Advent call to be prepared.  The Lord’s first arrival accomplished the salvation of the Cross and ushered in the power of the sacraments.  We need to remain in that covenant gift and we need to renew ourselves in that fountain of sacramental grace flowing from the Lord’s open side on the Cross so that we are prepared for the Lord’s return in glory and our final passage to the heavenly promised land.

With good reason the Church teaches us that one of the values of confession and sacramental absolution is that we are restored to baptismal grace (cf. CCC 1446).  We are called back to our beginnings in confession.  We are called back to that first gift of the forgiveness of sins.  After baptism we struggle with sin and we are inclined to sin.  After baptism, we commit sins for which we bear personal responsibility.  Such sins also need to be forgiven.  Like St. John’s ministry in today’s passage, we are called back to our beginnings in this holy season.  God is not done with us.  And we must prepare for His return in glory as Judge.  We pray so frequently, even daily, in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses”.  How foolish it would be to make such a request but then to never return, or to rarely return, to our beginnings where Jesus has indicated his gift of forgiveness and mercy exists, where it is found, is heard with our ears, and where it is granted in the sacrament of confession.

The preaching of St. Peter in the second reading likewise proclaims this call to repentance and the coming day of judgment.  The Lord “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…. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.”

First Sunday of Advent

Dominica I Adventus B
3 December 2023

 The season of Advent calls us to prepare for the Lord.  It calls us to prepare to observe the Lord’s first arrival at Christmas.  Advent also insists that we do not take our focus off of the arrival we still await: the Lord’s return in glory.  This season calls us to prepare space in our lives and to prepare time each day to be with the Lord.  Advent gives us the opportunity in alert, quiet prayer and in repentance from sin to be prepared to meet the Lord.   The type of preparation that disciples do is not narrowly focused only on arriving at some important event, like Christmas Day or Judgement Day.  Rather, the preparation of disciples has a broader focus.  It is a focus on living the faith now consistently; it is a focus on being prepared so as to be ready for some future event; and it is a focus on living beyond that event.  This broader focus may explain in part why at this time of year Catholics celebrate our Christmas joy only after Advent preparations, and why we continue to celebrate our Christmas joy well beyond Christmas Day; whereas, the world has mostly focused on the date of December 25th and has in large part already thrown out the Christmas Tree on December 26th.

This broader focus of Catholic preparation should be familiar to us.  We observe this broader focus all the time, so that we live beyond the event we are preparing for.  We have a time of preparation before baptism so that baptism is understood not merely as a cultural marker or as a static moment, but as a dynamic change of life that requires one to live baptismal commitments long after the wet hair has dried.  When children are preparing for their First Confession and First Holy Communion, it should be clear they are preparing to live those sacraments well beyond the first reception.  A catholic comes again and again to confession so that a catholic can more worthily receive again and again the great gift of the Holy Eucharist in Holy Communion.  Confirmation is not a graduation from living the faith.  It comes as the culmination of first living the faith.  And it is a gift of grace to be strong in being a witness to the Lord as a disciple more united to the mission of the Church.  The final example I’ll offer to demonstrate that a disciple is called to a broad view of preparation is the example of marriage.  I hope I can state with 100 percent agreement that no one would approach marriage with that more narrow view of preparation that focuses only on the wedding day.  Couples engage in marriage preparation for an extended period of time ahead of marriage such that they are strengthened to make their commitments, such that they arrive at the joyful event of the wedding day maximally prepared, and so that they live beyond the event, beyond just the day.  Disciples prepare in such a way to be focused to live a life of commitment in holy matrimony until death do they part.

In fact, as of now I can’t think of any important preparation we do as disciples that is really only about a narrow focus on a moment or an event, or a date on the calendar.  It is all about preparing in advance for an event that we are called to live beyond one solitary moment.  My examples of the type of broad preparation that a disciple must undertake have all been on the sacraments.  I chose that because I think it is familiar and easily understood.  But the point of this is to accept this template of broad preparation and to refer it back to the Gospel and the warnings we hear from the Lord about preparing for his arrival.  Our preparation to be ready to meet the Lord when he comes again must begin now.  Preparing now means we grow in our commitments as a disciple in the present.  In so doing, we gradually and increasingly become the type of disciple who is prepared for that unknown day and hour of the Lord’s return.  By taking up this broader view of preparation as regards the coming judgment, we are then living in a way that has us alert, watchful, and ready for the Lord.  And if that is the case, then we have hope to live beyond the event of his return, for our focus must also be the life to come after judgment.

The gift of Advent comes perhaps when we most need it.  It comes at a time of year that tends to be very hectic.  The advent call to a robust and broad preparation for the Lord comes when stores have us focusing on Christmas since September, with the risk that a focus on the return of the Lord in glory is almost totally eclipsed, so inundated are we about December 25th.  The gift of Advent comes to us in a culture marked heavily by Protestantism, some popular forms of which like to calculate the end times in a narrow focus given mostly to the event of the Lord’s return.  But our focus needs to be broadly on living now and living well our life in the Lord so that we are alert when the event happens, and ready to live beyond it as the Lord ushers in his kingdom.  I always find it curious when a well-meaning Christian spends a good amount of time figuring out the signs of the times and seeming to calculate them.  That is curious because it is directly contrary to God’s Word.  In fact, the very verse before today’s Gospel passage has Jesus indicate that “of that day or hour, no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”.  Not even the Son knows!  It is the Father’s secret.  In view of preparing for that arrival of the Lord we still await, the Lord does not want calculation but… “vigilation” – you know, to be vigilant!  In the brief Gospel passage we heard it several times: Be watchful!  Be alert!  Don’t be found sleeping.  Watch!  Only a broadly viewed preparation that begins now adequately addresses that call of the Lord.  The call of the Gospel can serve as an examination of conscience for us.  Are there areas where I am not accepting the teaching of Christ and his Church?  Areas where I am holding onto some opinion or popular thought that is not consistent with authentic Catholicism?  If so, then I am asleep.  Are there areas where my moral choices are not consistent with living well my life in the Lord here and now?  If so, then I am asleep.  Are there areas where I do not practice the sacramental life as I should, leaving myself void of the grace that is the Lord’s gift for my preparation?  If so, then I am asleep.  Is there always time for so many things except a meaningful and vibrant daily prayer life?  If so, then I am asleep.  “May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.  What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch’!”