SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT
7 DECEMBER 2014
By
the time the Second Letter of Saint Peter was written, it was clear that the
Lord Jesus would not be coming back any time soon. As a result, some began preaching that the
Lord would not come again and that there would be no final judgment. To that error, the author, writing in the
name of the Apostle, responded that the Lord will definitely come again. He has not delayed his promise. Instead, he has delayed his second coming.
Using the
metaphor that one day with the Lord is a thousand years, it has been two
"days" since the Paschal Mystery.
In our day, we are also tempted to live as if the Lord will not come
again and as if there will be no judgment at the end of time. For that reason, we need to hear the author
telling us to be vigilant, a lesson we learned two times on our Pilgrimage last
summer. Had we been more vigilant in
Lucca, our bicycles would not have been stolen.
Had we been more vigilant in Rome, thieves would not have taken all the
rest of our belongings. If we could go
back in time, we would have behaved differently. We would have walked our bikes through the
streets of Lucca and taken turns sitting with the bikes while visiting local
churches. We would have unloaded our
luggage first in Rome and then gone to Saint Peter's Square to celebrate our
arrival after 1,200 miles. But, we
cannot go back in time. We can only learn
from those lessons and do things differently if we ever do something like this
again.
The author
of the Second Letter of Saint Peter knows that we cannot go back in time. Instead, he provides a reason for the Lord
delaying his second coming. By delaying
his second coming, the Lord is providing us valuable time to look back on ways
we have not been vigilant and to use the time remaining as a gift to change our
ways. To use the image of the Prophet
Isaiah, the Season of Advent gives us time to make straight the way of the
Lord, so that he can come directly into our lives. We can remove the mountains that have become
obstacles and fill in the valleys which have become pitfalls for the Lord to come
to us in an intimate way.
John the
Baptist provides ways of using the time in this Season of Advent. John's father was a priest in the Temple of
Jerusalem. He helped people to prepare
the paschal lambs for sacrifice to ask God for reconciliation. That is not where John speaks in today's
Gospel. John has gone to the wilderness,
to the quiet of the desert. where his ancestors had found God in their Exodus
from Egypt. From that barren place, he
points to the coming of God's only begotten Son, who will become the real Lamb
of God sacrificed, not in a sacred Temple, but on a hill where criminals were
executed outside the city walls. That
sacrifice will become the perfect sacrifice which reconciles us with the
Father. As recipients of that sacrifice,
we are formed into a living Temple guided by the gift of the Holy Spirit given
to us when we were baptized.
John the
Baptist eats locusts which speak of God's judgment and honey which speaks of
God's mercy. John invites us to take
some time from the craziness of our culture's holiday season to use Advent as a
time to look back on ways in which we have not been vigilant and aware of the
Lord's presence and change those patterns of behavior in the time given to us
by the Lord. One very real way of using this
gift of time is to make a good confession.
Come to the Advent Penance Service a week from Tuesday. There will be 17 priests. Together, we hear the Word of God which can open
our eyes to God's judgment on our failures.
Individually, we encounter the Lord's mercy in the Sacrament. As we wait for others to do the same, we sit
in the quiet to be with the Lord. Through
the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the fire of the Lord's love burns away our
sins. In experiencing the fire of that
love, we can face the fire of the Lord's Second Coming with vigilance and
without fear.
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