Mass readings for the 3rd Sunday of Advent:
Isaiah 35.1-6a, 10 Psalm 146.6c-10 James 5.7-10 Matthew 11.2-11
Last week I said that the key to finding what we’re looking for is knowing what we’re looking for! And Jesus today challenges those who’ve come to him with reference to John the Baptist and the many who were drawn to seek our Saviour’s forerunner. What were they looking for? What did they expect to find by the banks of the Jordan River? “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken in the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who are in soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A Prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a Prophet.”
It’s pretty harsh, especially as a word to those who were feeling lost, vulnerable, hopeless… If we’re looking for comfort, easy reassurance about our lives, our choices, something unconditionally and uncritically affirming of us in our struggles, I fear then we’re looking in the wrong place if we’ve come to a church, gone to a Catholic retreat house, set off on a pilgrimage to a great shrine, walking mile upon mile through mountains, forest and plain. Indeed, we don’t need to do any of that! The world is more than happy to offer us reassurances that we’ve been right all along, that the problem is others, that we’re misunderstood, underappreciated, that we’ve done nothing that cannot be justified. Who can judge us? They haven’t lived our lives, walked in our shoes, dealt with the crap we’ve had to deal with!
That has been the modus operandi of our society both writ large and small for some time; and I don’t want to simply put that down to the social revolution of the 60s and 70s that saw faith abandoned, the family attacked, the moral compass discarded. We’ve a lot of choice as to when to backdate the slide we’re in, but that we’re in it is hard to deny. As I’ve mentioned here, Pope after Pope of the modern era has sounded the alarm: Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), St. John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), Paul VI in Humana Vitae (1968), Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor (1979) and Evangelium Vitae (1997). These and many more have been a call to return to the first principles of the Christian faith, to Gospel truths about who we are as limited, fallible human beings in need of redemption, and the humility required to accept it.
What we see in the first century in Judea is a state to which human beings continually return to in troubled times, what is often referred to as a spiritual or religious revival – that is “a coming back to life”. This happens when personal rationalizations, and those a corrupt society offers, no longer seem to have the power to explain to us what is going on in convincing terms. And today, we find in the loss of trust in institutions, and economic and political problems domestic and international, that sense of crisis that prompts people to go looking for answers.
We know that in the time of Jesus people were pressed to extremes because they were leaving their towns and cities, and going off into the wilderness in search of answers. Civilized people of that time didn’t do that, go off into the wilderness – there was no such thing as recreational camping in the first century.
For most of us today, true wilderness camping is the pursuit of a relatively small minority. The most adventurous I get now is a nice provincial park with electrical hook ups, and lit washrooms with hot showers.
In the first century of course, the wilderness was filled with dangers: bandits, wild animals, or simply the possibility of becoming lost, then starving or dying for lack of water. One didn’t go off into the wilderness on a whim. Something urgent drives you there. And as we see in the gospels, in the first century, an increasingly desperate people were being driven to take the risk.
As I’ve said before, the context for the people of Israel, was the sense of their looming extinction, and the very real immediate need for a saviour, a Messiah. And he was not to be found in the usual places: the royal palace, where one would naturally look for a king, they only found frauds.
However, if one wants to find a true king, a new leader, someone truly anointed by God, you’ve got to ask a prophet. And as Jesus rightly says to the people, a prophet was what they were looking for in John the Baptist. And what did he tell them to do? How were they going to find the Messiah?
And of course, it wasn’t simply a matter of having John point that man out, even as we know he did. No, first step: repent. Whatever you’re doing, that you know is not in keeping with God, with his laws, with his love, stop it. And as to how to then go forward, to ensure that we will keep to the right path, and find this Messiah, we’ve got to not fall into old habits of thought and action; we’ve got to avoid trying the solutions of the past, especially as they didn’t solve anything! And we know they didn’t because, well, here we are. There is now the ironically illiberal instinct within the liberal nations of the west toward controlling and censoring people, and that will not end well. But for the powers that be, creating a society grounded in faith that recognizes and then follows Christ, well, that is beyond contemplating. While they do want some of the benefits of Christian faith; that kindness and neighborliness that was once the sine qua non of Canadian society, they want that without involving Jesus, and without true spiritual conversion.
But if we try to find our way to Christ absent the repentance John the Baptist calls us to, then we will avoid him, and hold back from what the gospel demands. And we hold back because its demand to give ourselves over to Christ is not consistent with the way we are living our lives. For example, we cannot live a life focussed on material wealth, even in the most modest of terms, and expect to find spiritual riches – our attachments to this world keep us bound to it. As Jesus teaches us, those of us who love their life will lose it because it will be a choosing of this finite mortal life over an eternal life in Christ.
As a young man, with a tenuous, tentative relationship with God and His Church, despite an upbringing in Christian faith, as soon as I left home and the discipline of Sunday morning services, I drifted away pretty quickly, but not entirely. That is, the currents of life would occasionally drag me along back, and come a Sunday morning and I would find myself in church, but not sure why. Of course, the most pointed instance of that was at Christmas. And in the personal crises I was suffering, there was something comforting in singing the carols, in saying the prayers, but there was nevertheless that holding back from Christ, and hanging onto the promises the world had made to me, its glamour and flash and excitement. Frankly, I had experienced very little of that, but nonetheless hoped to. I came to church, in true spiritual need, but without repentance – that would only come with a great fall, the collapse of everything I had built up in my life to that point, had built on sand.
We will have quite a few people joining us at Christmas, as in every year, who make of that their annual duty to come to mass, and be content to keep it to that, and perhaps Easter Sunday. Now, we are critical of that kind of piety, but I would also hope charitable – I don’t think such folks know why they’re here on those one or two occasions a year, first communions, weddings and baptisms aside. Many here today were in that situation once… I was.
We also know from recent research that there are many more coming out to regular masses, to the services of other Christian denominations, and they are looking for something. The promises of the secular liberal world order are proving ever-more empty, and this curiousity seems to correlate with demographics. Younger people are searching because, with most of their life still before them, they are looking for answers to questions they’re still formulating. They are wanting signs and proofs that this life has something for them other than the disappointments of the recent past, and the letdowns forecast for the future.
And that might be thinking in material terms, but we need to remember that as Christians, we are incarnate beings. We live in the material world and our spirits are affected by our material circumstances. And while the Church teaches that suffering is part of life, and we should not fear it; there ought to be joy too. So much of what the world is offering now strikes so many as little more than distraction not true celebration, and feeble substitutes for the things that truly bring us joy: family, friends, community, but also, work that offers us a sense of accomplishment and meaning.
For others still, as I mentioned last week, they are looking for health, absolution from guilt, and a sense of inner peace.
So, when the material, the physical, and the mental is affected, the spirit is too. But as physical beings in the material world with a mentality that can be focussed, we have the power to get up and move, to change our circumstances, to throw out the things in our life that distract, dissuade and discourage, to apply what energy we have to those things that generate something positive: like the contemplation of God’s word of mercy, love and justice, like prayer, like healthy spiritual fellowship.
That is work, but gosh, we’re working already no matter what we’re up to. Who and what are we working for? working toward what?
The prophet Isaiah tells us that when we find ourselves in that weakened and discouraged state the world often leaves us in, when we are bewildered by the chaos of it all, we need to turn to the Lord. He will “strengthen the weak hands, and make firm feeble knees.” There will be said to us in the depths of our souls, “Be strong, do not fear!”
We must take the good counsel of St. James who tells us to be patient, to be like the farmer who waits for the crop, and bear with each other with equal patience, frankly calling us to suffer together following the example of the prophets. But also to be as prophets who proclaim and live the truth; but to be even greater than the prophets of old. For we live in the light, the knowledge of Christ, and proclaim not what is to come, but what has already arrived: God among us as our strength and shield; to announce the inevitable victory of justice and love, and to celebrate now what will be accomplished sooner than any expect.
Amen.