Mk 1:1-8
Is 40:1-5,9-11
2 Pet 3:8-14
Focus: God cares for us.
Function: We are called upon to acknowledge our sinfulness and our failing, to recognize God’s ways and to make room for God in our lives.
Dear sisters and brothers in the Lord, My youngest cousin, Christine, and her husband Joseph raise 4 boys, currently ages 10 – 6 months. The second one in particular, Maximilian, when he was about 2 – 3 years old, used to have temper tantrums every now and then: crying, kicking and screaming, stomping his feet. Usually such a temper tantrum happens when children don’t get their own way.
Adults though can display less pleasant behavior, too, when they don’t get their own way. They might not lie on the floor and kick and scream, but they may well pout, get angry, or walk out after slamming a door. Getting our own way seems to be something we struggle with all our lives. It easily obstructs “conducting [our]selves in holiness and devotion,” as St. Peter in our second reading puts it. Our own way must make room for God’s ways.
Today’s Scripture texts speak to us about the ways of God. Our first reading is taken from the book of Isaiah, the second part, which was written at a time when the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon, into exile, and lived far away from home. The prophet has good news for them. He is telling them, in the name of God: You’ve experienced enough sorrow, and lived in a foreign land for too long. God will lead you into freedom and back home.
This message is given in the form of a dialogue between God and heavenly beings, one of whom summons the others to prepare the way and so to make it possible for the people of Israel to return, led by God, to the promised land and to the home of their ancestors. God cares for his people, Isaiah says, God guides them as a shepherd guides his flock. He gathers the lambs in his arms. God will make sure that his people are well.
“In the desert prepare a way for the Lord!” This call was originally meant quite physically and politically: The Persian King Cyrus, inspired by God, had given permission; now the people can go back home and will do so, in a new Exodus, from captivity into freedom, like at the time of Moses.
Over five hundred years later, John the Baptist considers it his task to prepare the way. Preaching in the desert, he calls his contemporaries to an inner journey of repentance and conversion, to a journey of aligning their own wills and ways with the will and the ways of God, to a journey of becoming ready for the mightier one than himself, the Messiah, who will come after him.
In today’s second reading, St. Peter calls upon his early Christian community in Rome to come to repentance, in order for them to be ready for the day of the Lord, the second coming of Jesus,
the new heaven and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells.
All three readings point us to what the season of Advent is about. Our word advent is derived from the Latin adventus, which means arrival. We await and prepare for God’s arrival in Jesus as the infant of Bethlehem, for his arrival in glory at the end of time, but also for God’s arrival today in our own hearts.
Dear sisters and brothers in the Lord, God cares for us. We are called upon to acknowledge our sinfulness and our failing to recognize God’s ways and to make room for God in our lives.
Isaiah’s, John the Baptist’s and Peter’s words are directed also to us today. The God who cares for us is at the side of those who feel imprisoned in difficult life situations, in a depression may be, perhaps in part caused by this time of pandemic which never seems to want to end, or in an addiction perhaps. God guides and leads out those who want to be set free!
A good illustration of this for the world in which we live today is the GPS. The GPS tells us where to go and when to turn. If we haven’t followed its direction, it will tell us: Take the next right turn or: turn around! That’s what the advent prophets do for us, too: they show the way,
they tell us to turn around where and when it is necessary.
Yes, God calls upon us to turn around, to convert, to change our minds—that’s what the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, literally means. If we do so in prayer and in the sacrament of reconciliation during Advent and strive to correct our weaknesses, God’s ways will become our ways more and more and we will become ready for God’s arrival in our hearts and in our lives. AMEN.
~Fr. Thomas Leitner, OSB