SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT
6 DECEMBER 2020
In
this section of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the prophet speaks to his
people in exile in Babylon. They know
that this calamity was a result of their bad choices. They had ignored their Covenant with
God. They had made disastrous treaties
with kings they should not have trusted.
They had ignored the poor. Their
halfhearted desire to be in union with God had been reflected in their haphazard
sacrifices in the temple. But instead of
rubbing their sins in their faces, God speaks through the prophet to offer
comfort. The people can take comfort in
what God had done in the past. God had rescued
their ancestors from slavery in Egypt.
Led by Moses through harsh desert of the Sinai Peninsula, they
encountered the locusts of their bad choices.
In that harsh desert, there were few distractions. In the desert, God had taught them how to put
together a new life, how to leave behind their slavery, and how to behave as
free people in the land promised to their ancestor Abraham. Having learned those lessons in the desert,
they followed the leadership of Joshua and crossed the Jordan River into the
Land of milk and honey.
Assuring
his people of the comfort of God’s love, the prophet today proclaims the glad
tidings and good news that God will save his people again. God will reveal his glory by using the pagan
king Cyrus to free them and lead them through another desert back to their promised
land. They will rebuild their city and
temple on Mount Zion.
Today, we
hear the beginning of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, a Gospel we will hear
on most Sundays during this liturgical year.
Saint Mark makes it clear that the prophecy of Isaiah has been fulfilled
in ways that no one could ever have imagined.
Saint Mark proclaims the good news of a new creation. Just as God had
begun the work of creation in the Book of Genesis, God is beginning a new creation
in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ.
These glad
tidings are announced by John the Baptist, who lives in a barren desert to
encounter God without distraction. John
proclaims to everyone their need to repent.
His diet is symbolic. He invites
them to repent of the locusts of God’s judgment and enter the Jordan River to
be baptized, much as their ancestors had entered that same river at the end of
their journey through the desert, to accept the honey of God’s mercy. John is humble in his mission. He is the one who points the way to the
Messiah. Those who embrace the Good News
of Jesus Christ will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, guiding us on our way to
salvation.
These same
words are addressed to us. When we began
this year, none of us could have imagined the ways our lives have changed in
these last ten months. We could not have
predicted the harsh desert of this pandemic and all our divisions and the
darkness in which we now dwell. We know
for sure that this pandemic is not God’s punishment for our sins. Instead, we
peer through this darkness to recognize the comfort of God’s love in the midst
of this mess.
Isaiah invites us to look at the
ways God has comforted us in the past and to recognize the comforts of God’s
love now. The Lord has not abandoned us,
and Advent invites us to see his comfort now in unexpected ways. As the Letter of Saint Peter says, we live between
his first coming at Christmas and his second coming at the end of time, when he
will come like a thief. One of the ways
that the Lord comes to us now is in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In this Sacrament, the Lord comforts us with
the honey of his mercy. Knowing that we have
little control over so much chaos these days, we can bring our own darkness,
our own locusts of turning away from God and each other, to the honey of God’s
mercy. Please consider coming to the
Sacrament during this Advent Season. It
is a powerful tool to turn more completely to the Lord, reconciling us and
bringing us a peace the world cannot give.
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