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.

A Spiritual Reflection for Advent: 'The Comings of Jesus'

As part of my own preparation for the season of Christmas, I am going to post on the Sundays of Advent reflections from a publication entitled "All Things Made New: Homily Reflections for Sundays and Holy Days" by Harold A. Buetow, PhD, JD. Father Buetow has in recent years published an array of superb spiritual reflections for all the days of the liturgical calendar and the special occasions in one's life.

Father Buetow is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn who spent thirty years on the faculty of The Catholic University of America and was Senior Staff Editor on The New Catholic Encyclopedia. He is the author of the two most important books on Catholic education -- Of Singular Benefit: The Story of U.S. Catholic Education and The Catholic School: Its Roots, Identity, and Future. His more recent spiritual reflections are published by Alba House and are available through Amazon (see widget to the right).

I was privileged to take two graduate courses from Father Buetow at Catholic University and he has been my good friend for over twenty years. I have no doubt you will find these reflections helpful and inspiring for your own spiritual journey.

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Is 63:16f.;64:1, 3-9 -- 1 Cor 1:3-9 -- Mk 13:33-37

The Comings of Jesus
By Harold A. Buetow, PhD, JD

A critic with a sense of humor once said of a play he disliked that he saw it under adverse conditions -- with the curtain up. For many people life itself is a shapeless play without any apparent plot or direction. Many of us just slide along in life. If we gave the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two-week vacation, we'd be startled at how aimless are our "busy" days. Reflection upon meaningful goals of life is made difficult by such pressures of modern living as how we're going to meet payments, the rampant secularistic outlook which suggests that this present world is all there is, the political approach which says that the materially good life is all we want.

Christian teaching goes against all that. In the Church's celebration of the mystery of Christ, during the closing Sundays of the past Church year we looked forward to the final coming of Jesus. Today, as we're beginning a new Church year, we do the same, in a marvelous mixture of end and beginning. Some, however, say that the Church's real "New Year" should be at Easter time, when the Lord makes all things new in his death and resurrection. Still others observe that there really is no "Church Year" as such, but that we simply have different liturgical seasons and celebrations. In any case, there are three cycles of readings, today we begin Cycle B, and Cycle B is the year of St. Marks' Gospel. Because of the analogy with Lent, Advent acquired a penitential character. The liturgical color is the color of penitence. But in Advent we're told to rejoice. So many would like to eliminate the penitential character of Advent. Advent should be a season when we renew our hope because of the coming of Christ.

As we reflect upon the period of waiting for Jesus' first coming at Bethlehem, as we begin to prepare for his coming now at Christmas, we also await his final coming into our lives. In other words, we celebrate his coming in history, his coming in mystery, and his coming in majesty. Knowing that he has already come as a child born of Mary gives us confidence. Amidst the overshadowing material preparations for Christmas, we begin our spiritual preparation for Christ's coming by way of the season of Advent.

Jesus' voice, through St. Mark's Gospel, stirs us to be watchful and alert (v. 33). The disciples had asked when the end of the world would come, Jesus didn't get specific about time, but his central teaching is that he will return in glory to usher in the end of the world. Because no one but the Father knows the precise time of any of the end events, it's necessary to be constantly vigilant. One thing is sure: No matter when Jesus' second coming to planet Earth, he will be coming to each of us at our death.

Jesus' one-line (v.34) parable about it tells of a traveling master who leaves his employees in charge. The moral of the story (vv. 35f.) is that we have to be on the alert not only about the end, but about our responsibility toward the present; Every moment has an eternal significance, so we should be on guard (v. 37). It's a message that's relevant to all times, but especially to our own, when some of our technological inventions remind us constantly that we live in the shadow of eternity. Troubled societies always ask questions about the end of the world. Ours is no exception. The fact always is that we're either going to go meet the Lord at death or when he appears in his glorious second coming -- whichever comes first, as the warranties say. These are fitting thoughts for Advent.

Equally fitting for the spirit of Advent are today's thoughts from Isaiah; thoughts given to his dispirited people around the end of their exile in Babylon of the need for a Redeemer for the human race's sinfulness. The passage opens and closes by addressing the Lord our father (vv. 63:16; 64:7), a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt when God had called Israel his son, his first-born (Ex 4:22). Because in this life we're all exiles, we make Isaiah's Advent prayer our own. No matter what one may see of sin in oneself and be disappointed, there's always encouragement: God rescues and saves -- but He does rescue and save. Even if you've hit bottom, there's the encouragement that there's no place to go but up.

When Isaiah saw Jerusalem hit bottom in ruins, he pleaded for God to tear the heavens open and come down (v. 19); the people of that time thought of the skies as a solid, plastic-like transparent vault, which would need breaking through for God to come to earth. At the same time Isaiah's prayer (64: 2-7), intended to be recited by all the people, confessed their guilt and admitted that God was right to have permitted the Exile as a punishment for sin. God hasn't heaped a heavy burden of sorrow upon sinners; He's simply allowed sinners to wallow in their own responsible guilt. By ourselves, we're like withered leaves carried to and fro by the winds of our guilt. (God's welcoming attitude is well expressed by the beautiful hymn, "Come back to me.")

St. Paul in today's Second Reading also provides an appropriate opening to the season of Advent. Paul was aware of the sinfulness of the Corinthians, even the Christians among them: pride, immaturity, faithlessness, and -- a very great problem -- the divisions within the community. Despite his knowledge that he was going to have to deal honestly with these problems, Paul diplomatically begins his letter warmly. He opens (v. 3) with a prayer for what have become the essential blessings of Christianity: "grace" -- what the nonreligious world might call "good health" or "good luck" -- and "peace," the Jewish "shalom," a special kind of all-embracing well-being that can come from God alone. This includes not only harmony among people, but also the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God: the kind of warmth we feel at Christmas.

In this opening of his letter, Paul addresses some Corinthian Christians who were boasting of their many gifts. None seemed to understand that gifts are things one doesn't deserve and can't earn. Among their gifts were the wonder-causing speaking in tongues, prophecy, proclaiming wisdom, teaching, and making public God's revelations. We can think of others that have been given to us -- music, for example, or the ability to work with one's hands, and all kinds of other talents. All of them aren't to be used for our gain, but held in trust for the honor of God.

Right up front, Paul states his own position about himself. Some Corinthians had had doubts about whether Paul was a true apostle, because other preachers were more dynamic than he. He reminds them that the very gifts they had from God were proof that his preaching had been effective (vv. 6f). Paul's reference to waiting for Jesus' full revelation (v. 7) is an excellent expression of the Advent spirit. Part and parcel of Paul's teaching is that the Lord will come in glory at the end of time. Until that time, all are to rely on God's gifts of faith, grace, and peace.

The Advent theme continues as Paul speaks of the "day of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Jewish Scriptures had often used the phrase, "The Day of the Lord." Paul and the other early Christians looked upon that day as the time when the Lord would return in his full glory; it would also be a day of judgment. Meanwhile, reminiscent of the spirit of encouragement in Isaiah, Paul reminds us that through all our problems and difficulties God is faithful, and has called us to fellowship with his Son (v. 9). That fellowship is very intimate: It means the life-giving union that exists among us faithful that arises from our union with Christ.

We can't call ourselves Christian and live our lives without a purpose. We wait for the comings of Jesus -- in everyday living, at Christmas, at our death, and at the end of the world. We're going to be held accountable for the eternal significance of every moment. All waiting involves some tension, even if it's simple waiting on a street corner for a friend. When waiting involves the very meaning of life, temptations can intrude themselves. In that respect, we're no different from the ancient Israelites who were tempted to despair before seemingly insurmountable difficulties, the Corinthians who were tempted to pride over their gifts, and Jesus' first apostles who were tempted to gloat in the power of the Second Coming.

The seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa painted "L'Umana fragilita." It depicts a mother, an infant, and Death, who is represented by a winged skeleton. As the mother looks on passively, Death is forcing the baby to scrawl the following words on a piece of paper: "Conception is sinful, life is suffering, death inevitable." At an exhibit of that painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., modern cynical non-believers stood transfixed before this barren summary of their lives.

But Christians have what Isaiah promised: a new hope, a new light. And our waiting for Jesus isn't a despair-filled tension. So we live by faith, walk in hope, and are renewed in love so that, when the last scene of the drama of our life unfolds and Jesus comes to be our judge, we shall not merely know him, but come to him as a friend.