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Sunday, December 7, 2008

A Spiritual Reflection for Advent


SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Is 40:1-5,9-11 -- 2 P 3:8-14 -- Mk 1:1-8

Preparing for Christ's Coming: Repentance
By Harold A. Buetow, PhD, JD


People have for a long time alternatively loved and hated living in cities. One poet said that the builder of cities was Eros, the spirit of life, but another spoke of "the hum of human cities" as torture. When people get filled up with the dirt, corruption, and crime of cities they move out; at other times, impressed with cities' convenience, culture, and nearness to other people, they move back. In the long span of history, suburbs are a relative newcomer.

It's difficult to fathom why in the time of Jesus the people left relatively comfortable cities like Jerusalem to go out into the desert to hear John the Baptist. Despite the stirring and spine-tingling opening words of today's Good News, sometimes the Good News seems to have a packaging problem. In New Testament times the "Good News," or Gospel, had come to mean in particular political good news, one being the visit of a king to one of his subject cities. In the ancient world such a visit could mean pardons, the promise of new buildings, and other benefits.

Nothing in today's Gospel looked much like good news. That desert was one of the most abandoned places in the world. Its deep gulches, arid limestone soil, and rocky precipices looked warped and twisted. Its days were unbearably hot, its nights terribly cold.

John's food was locusts and wild honey. The locusts supplied his body's need for protein, the honey its requirement of sugar. Whereas locusts are unlikely candidates for an American dinner menu, that's in part the result of cultural eating habits. Americans consume by the millions less clean-living animals such as lobsters and oysters. In the bayous of Louisiana, some people eat a stew of nutria, which is a water-dwelling rodent. One United States cookbook on strange foods has recipes for things like rodents, pigeons, reptiles, sharks, insects, and fish sperm.

Locusts remain high-protein foods that nourish people in other countries. A young man in Korea, hearing of the Baptist's menu, said, "Ugh, that's disgusting! I hate honey!" Bushmen of Africa's Kalahari desert eat cockroaches. Crickets and termites are standard in other parts of Africa; termites, ounce for ounce, have twice the protein of sirloin steak. In Bali, butterflies and moths, lightly toasted, are staple fare. In Thailand and elsewhere, plump, juicy, high-protein, low-fat dragonfly larvae are considered a delicacy. In China, people eat camel hump, dog, cat, raw monkey brains, snake, armadillo, and bear paw -- and make most of it taste good. In Japan, grilled snake meat is eaten; in Mexico, fried caterpillars; in Samoa, baked bat; in Turkey, charcoal-grilled lamb testicles.

John's skin was like leather, his feet strong and hard, his face emaciated and stern, his hair never cut or shaved, and his body wiry. His clothes were a loose weave of camel's hair, tied about his waist by a leather belt. No political marketer would permit John to appear in public looking like that today.

Another side of John caused some of the people to think that he was the Messiah; his remarkable austerity, which struck the imagination; the very suddenness of his appearance; his mighty voice which shook the people from their listlessness; and the fact that there had been no prophet for about 400 years. John's self-sacrificing way of life resulted in a piercing eye, a majesty of bearing, a voice of authority together with a touching humility.

John's message was present not only in his words but in his whole life: The man was the message. The time of Jesus was a time of elegance for the rich. That a messenger should make paths straight (v.3) by filling in the valleys and cutting into the hills (Is 40:4) was the custom of kings. A herald would precede a king on a journey, to forewarn the inhabitants of his arrival so that they might thus smooth out their ill-kept roads.

John's essential message was repentance. This would be an important message of Jesus, too. Repentance doesn't mean only regret for the past or the performance of penance, but in addition a change of mind and heart, a new direction of life, and a new beginning, in keeping with the will of God. Its outward sign for both John and Jesus was baptism. John's baptism was an external sign and no more. The Jews were familiar with ritual washings like that. Symbolic washing and purifying was part of the very fabric of Jewish life, as we know from the regulations in the Book of Leviticus (11-15) and from part of the Pharisees' criticisms of Jesus. All of this is, of course, different from Jesus' Baptism, which is a Sacrament containing the Holy Spirit.

St. Mark, the first of the Gospels to be written, shows us that Jesus' story didn't begin with his birth on earth, but began in the mind of God long before. Mark reminds us that what he is presenting is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The word "Christ" is not a surname, and it means "Anointed One" or "Messiah." To his contemporaries Jesus, whose name means "Savior," would have been referred to as Jesus the Son of Joseph, to signify whom they thought his father to be, or Jesus the Nazarean, indicating his city of origin, as later with Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and others.

Mark calls Jesus the "Son of God," These opening words are special: They fling us right into the middle of Jesus' reason for coming into this world; they make us want to read on. Mark tells us about it here in the very first verse of his Gospel, and again at the end, when the soldier who stood facing him on the cross will declare that this man was truly the son of God! (15:39).

Even in early Christianity, though, not all the disciples of John the Baptist followed his advice. As with us when things go wrong, they wondered where God was in all of this, and became discouraged because justice didn't seem to be triumphing. Many of John's followers didn't become Christians. These were a difficult problem for the primitive Church.

The vision of what can happen for those who live by God's word is contained in Isaiah, especially in passages like today's First Reading. This is the part of Isaiah that is set most beautifully to music by Handel in his Messiah. It's the part of Isaiah that Mark was quoting in the beginning of his Gospel in today's reading. It was written when the Exile in Babylon was about to end, and the people of Israel about to be set free from their captivity. To capture the joy and excitement of the time, the sacred writer tried to rekindle the vision of the great events of the first Exodus.

Isaiah's command in the first verse, to give comfort, sets a tone of mercy. The beautiful injunction to speak tenderly (v. 2) indicates that the prophet is to speak to the heart, like the deeply-felt words with which a lover woos his beloved. But Jerusalem at this time was in shambles, hardly able to listen to God's words -- like us when we're wrapped too much in pain.

Isaiah's phrase about the glory of the Lord (v. 5) promises a wonderful manifestation of God's redeeming presence, like what we have in the wonder of the undeserved enthralling gift at Christmas. The remaining verses (9-10) move with a mounting crescendo to the point where we fear not to cry out the good news. The climax is God as both powerful conquering hero and gentle shepherd-king who is close to his people (v. 10f), a familiar figure to the Jews. One of the most moving modern uses of this passage of Isaiah was Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" sermon, pleading for freedom and equality for all forgotten peoples, a true messianic expectation.

Reconciling our vision with God's sometimes seeming absence from our lives is what today's Second Reading is about. Written in the tradition of St. Peter, probably after the turn of the first century, it's the last book of the Bible to be written. Two generations had come and gone since Jesus and, contrary to expectations, the Lord hadn't returned. Many people were disillusioned.

The passage reminds us that Jesus' comings other than the first Christmas may seem like delay. We associate delay with a tactic of bureaucracy, and we don't like it whenever we're its victims. As the letter reminds us, however, time isn't the same to God as to us: A thousand years to us are as a day in the sight of God. Perhaps the author got his statement from Psalm 90, which says to God that a thousand years in his sight are as yesterday. To God, time is vertical: that is, all time is always present. To us, on the other hand, time is horizontal: that is, Saturday follows Friday, eleven o'clock follows ten, December follows November. So when we do wrong we're causing Jesus' sufferings in the past, in the present, and in the future.

And though all of our life -- not God's -- is a waiting, an Advent, we can't hold God to our time-table: He will come. In the case of the Lord's coming into our lives -- at the death and at the end of the world -- it's not delay; it's God's patience. And God's patience is for our benefit: God doesn't want anyone to perish (v. 9), and we who live in the order of time have with every day an opportunity, a gift of God's mercy. The "day of the Lord" (v. 10), a phrase we find throughout the First Testament, offers a larger hope.

For us to put off hearing and acting upon John the Baptist's message of repentance, however, isn't like the patience of God; that is delay. We delude ourselves if we think that our experience is the reality, and all of these lessons a dream. Just as the earth which we think so solid is really a group of giant plates underground, whose movements produce the turbulence of earthquakes and volcanoes, so Advent reminds us that we don't live on firm time but on giant shifting epochs whose transitions mark the advents of God.

Think, for example, of the consequences of unprepared-for volcanic eruptions. The volcano of Santorini, near Crete, in 1600 B.C., exploded with a force that spelled the end of the entire Minoan civilization. In the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius near the Roman city of Pompeii in A.D. 79, many thousands of victims died. When Mount Tambora near Java erupted in 1815, it caused summer crops in France to fail, snow in New England in June, and fields white with frost on the Fourth of July in the United States South.

With the explosion of Krakatoa, a 2700-foot-high volcano in Indonesia, in 1883, the noise shattered the eardrums of sailors 25 miles away, and the eruption set off seismic sea waves -- tsunamis -- that swept miles inland on nearby islands and killed some 36,000 people. In 1906, when the rocky masses of the San Andreas fault heaved violently, it distinguished San Francisco as the only United States city ever to have been destroyed by earthquake; fire raged uncontrollably for three days until extinguished by rain; four square miles in the center of town were gone, many lives lost, and incalculable property damage caused. San Francisco's 1989 earthquake was minor in comparison. Seismologists warn that the next great rumbling of the San Andreas fault may take a vastly greater toll.

When Mount St. Helens in Washington State in May 1980 erupted with a force equivalent to more than 20,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, it blew down forests as if the trees were toothpicks, some as far as 17 miles away. The outbursts of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991 blasted up to 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Hot pumice rained from the sky, blotting out the sun. An observer said it looked like the end of the world.

We can be certain that this present age of which the Bible speaks will one day for all of us change into what the Bible calls "the age to come." The character of the age to come is going to depend on what we do in this present age. There comes a day when Christ will break into the life of each of us. Our life is a perpetual advent for that. Let's not delay to prepare for the coming of the Lord.


From All Things Made New: Homily Reflections or Sundays and Holy Days, by Harold A. Buetow, published by Alba House.


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