2nd Sunday Advent B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

I like Isaiah the prophet. I like Isaiah the poet. And I like his message for us today. He must have known we would need some comforting. Did you hear what he had to say? “Console my people, console them”. And then, “Shout with a loud voice, joyful messenger… Shout without fear.”

But there is a caveat. Isaiah was writing still five to six hundred years before the advent of Jesus. He, along with the Jewish people, still had more growing up to do. He was still wrestling with an issue that many of our contemporaries, perhaps many of us, still wrestle with – getting a consistent sense of God. Along with his insight into the God who comforts, he carried the inherited sense of a God still prone to violence, “Here is the Lord God coming with power, his arm subduing all things to him”. Worse, he [they] interpreted the exile from which the Jewish people were about to be freed as “double punishment for all her crimes ... that she has received from the hand of the Lord”. It is the child’s view of family relationships. The child sees parents as loving sometimes, but also powerful, and is prepared even to accept punishment as par for the course. It is the childish view, too, of God that a lot of adults never grow out of.

Perhaps as well as prophet and poet, Isaiah was something of a dancer: two steps forward, one step back – first a tender God who consoles, then a powerful God who subdues and punishes, and then, consoling again, “… like a shepherd feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast and leading to their rest the mother ewes”.

Let’s look at Mark. He introduced his book as “the Gospel [or the Good News] of Jesus”. More – it was not just that Jesus was Good News, but that Jesus was the revelation of God, “Christ, Son of God” – showing us in human translation, as it were, what God is like. Mark was saying, equivalently, that God also is “Good News”.

Before introducing us to Jesus, Mark introduced us to John the Baptist; and used John to introduce us to Jesus. John said that Jesus would be “powerful”, and that his actions would be empowered by “the Holy Spirit” of God. In the rest of the Gospel Mark showed us that the power of Jesus lay, not in the power to coerce, not in the power to punish, but in his personal integrity, his consistent non-violence and in the beauty and attractiveness of truth. Even miracles were not so much deeds of power, intended to prove something about Jesus, but tender expressions of his desire to give welcome and life to those most in need.

John proclaimed a baptism of “repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. It is sin that poisons human interactions, leading us to engage with others on the basis of power rather than of intimacy, with hostility rather than respect. But to move beyond the generally unrecognised culture of sin, we need to repent – to see life differently, to see God differently, to see ourselves and others differently. We need to grow up. Simply, we need to learn how to love as alert and responsible adults.

In its report last week on the diocese of Ballarat, the Royal Commission focused more on the bishop and priests than it did on the perpetrators. Effectively, it said that we need to learn to relate, not as children to parent, but as adult brothers and sisters to each other. We need to be free to call each other to accountability. A metaphor that is helpful in its application to God and us can be quite inappropriate in another context. To me, this is where using the image of shepherd to sheep in order to model the relationship of bishop to priest, or priest to parishioners, is dangerous. It has contributed to infantilizing all of us. We need to grow up. I do; you do; even the bishop does.