2nd Sunday Advent B - Homily 5

Homily 5-2020

In today’s Second Reading, Isaiah can hardly contain himself for the bursting hope that filled him, “Shout with a loud voice .. shout without fear … say to the towns of Judah, ‘Here is your God’ …”. John the Baptist was no better, going out into the wilderness, living on “locusts and wild honey”, taking up Isaiah’s cry and articulating it as best he could, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. While most of us share neither Isaiah’s nor John the Baptist’s intense longing, we do, nevertheless, yearn for something more, something better, something perhaps eluding our capacity to identify it, but that disturbs and challenges our sense of incompleteness.

John the Baptist saw that incompleteness as due to what what he named sin. Regardless of how the catechism defined sin, the Scriptures saw and named sin as essentially “missing the point” — missing the point of life. Turn on the television, and what so regularly fills the screen is violence of some kind or other — war, refugees fleeing, people dying, terrorism, street protests, politicians arguing, people bad-mouthing each other … and on it goes. Is that what life is about? Have we somehow missed the point? If we stop and think, do we yearn rather to be loved? Might love be the point of life? Or does it seem so impossible that we do not even think of it?

The Baptist spoke of “forgiveness of sin”. The shape that love takes, needs to take, in a violent and incomplete world, is forgiveness. Has forgiveness become in our real world the point of life?

Yet we know so little about it. We rarely come across forgiveness in the world of television. We rarely hear it spoken about. Does anyone forgive? really forgive? And why? How do they manage it? A few days ago I read an article suggesting Pope Francis write another encyclical letter. In his recent one, he stated, among other things, that modern warfare can no longer meet the requirements for a just war. The author of the article suggested that Francis now write one about non-violent resistance as an alternative to war in the face of injustice.

Something radical is called for. In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist demanded “repentance” as the preliminary to the way of forgiveness. Sadly, we have domesticated the word repentance. What the word means, and certainly what the Baptist meant, is really “Rethink everything!” Earlier prophets spoke in terms of “eyes that see, hearts that understand”. Jesus used that language too. But it is hard to do so alone, given that instinctively we tend to “miss the point”.

Did you notice consciously today how Mark, the Gospel writer, began his Gospel as a whole? “The beginning of the Good News about Jesus — Christ, Son of God”. Mark left us with Jesus’ observations about the point of life. He left us with what Jesus had to say about about love — especially how love takes shape as forgiveness in today’s real world. Mark told us some of what Jesus had to say. He spoke more about how Jesus lived, and how he put into practice what he tried to put into words. Jesus started the ball rolling. He hoped that we would keep it going.

That was the beginning of the project, but only the beginning, of the “Good News”. Has humanity matured beyond the first chapter yet?