Reflections

Sunday’s Gospel, 2nd Week of Advent, Year A

05 December 2010

The stark figure of John the Baptist occupies the centre of the Liturgy of the Word in this Second Sunday of Advent, a figure of austerity and solitude.  Hard places, like hard times such as we in Ireland have been recently undergoing in our Church and economy, politics and even currently with our severe and unexpected climate change, do bring us undeniable blessings: we are confronted with our frailty, with our need of our fellow human beings.  Perhaps more uneasily, we must face a certain presumptuousness in our attitude that we had allowed to pervade our lives before. 
Was this the impetus for John the Baptist’s first words to us in this Sunday’s Gospel, the message of his ministry in the wilderness of Judea?  Simply and directly, he speaks from his obscure abode; “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

The wilderness is an unforgiving place, naturally speaking.  The first Cistercians chose it, vacating a more comfortable lifestyle at their monastery in Molesme, and generations of Cistercians have since cherished the same out-of-the-way places to build their monasteries and lives.  The secret of this infertile place is the self-abandonment it forms in us on our journey to God.  The desert will yield its own fruit, providing a necessary seed-ground for God’s saving graces. 

Like the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to John to be Baptised in the Judean desert however, not every act of ours in our religious participation is sincere on the journey to repentance.  His treatment of them is less than welcoming: “Brood of vipers!  Who warned you to fly from the retribution that is coming?  But if you are repentant produce the appropriate fruit, and do not presume to tell yourselves, “we have Abraham for our father.”  Like the first reading of today’s Mass, John the Baptist had the ability to search the heart as a confessor: “he does not judge by appearances, he gives no verdict on hearsay, but judges the wretched with integrity, and with equity gives a verdict for the poor of the land”. (Isaiah 11:3-4)

Opening our eyes to this knowledge of our poverty and our need of God gives us a new strength, an experience of a spiritual fortitude that grows in proportion to our learning to admit our emptiness without God.  We thus find ourselves, by God’s mercy “running in the way of his commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love”, (Rule of St Benedict, Prologue)  Now we are reborn, delivered into God’s hands, faithful to his designs.

...but he changes desert into streams
thirsty ground into springs of water
there he settles the hungry
and they build a city to dwell in  Psalm 106(107)

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