2nd Sunday Advent C - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2015

Today’s Gospel presents us with John, out in the bush, what the Gospel calls the wilderness, somewhere along the Jordan valley. His get-up was quite unusual, so any passers-by going on pilgrimage to the Temple, would have easily noticed him. He was urging people to “Prepare a way for the Lord...” The Church seems to think that it might help us if we, too, at this time of Advent, were to do precisely that.

“Prepare a way for the Lord”. How? What does that involve? John, at least, does not think that, whatever it is, it comes easily. It would require repentance, radical conversion. Conversion does not mean ‘more of the same, only better’. It means ‘Be different’. 

Jesus took up the same point. He preached repentance/conversion, too, as a preliminary to everything else he would have to say. And it was not long before it became obvious what he meant. In his Sermon on the Mount, for example, he urged us to ‘love our enemies’. Without thinking, we say, “How wonderful!” But we can’t, can we? Enemies are enemies. 

I believe that St Paul was on to something in today’s Second Reading, “My prayer is that your love for each other may increase more and more, and never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception.” Somehow he connected growth in love with ‘knowledge’ and ‘perception’, with how we know and how we perceive.

As far as my enemies go, I cannot stop them seeing me as the enemy. If they want to hurt me, oppose me, kill me, I cannot stop them. But can I begin to regard them differently? Honestly? Well, that is where I think repentance/conversion begins – learning to see.

I remember when I first went to the seminary many long years ago. One of the men in my year had been a professional artist. One afternoon we were walking together, and in the distance was a fence. He asked me, “If you were to paint this scene, what colour would you paint that fence?” I replied, “White”, because I had seen it numerous times before and knew it was white. He said, “Look again! Look carefully! From where we are standing, in this afternoon light, does it really look white?” I looked carefully, and realized that it had a marked purple tone. I had imposed my own preconceived certainties and did not see it as it truly was at that moment.

It is hard for us to see all that is simply as it is, without imposing our filters. In our Western world, after three centuries of scientific enlightenment, we are instinctively experts in analyzing, differentiating, seeing things clearly in black or white, either/or, this or that, friend or enemy, right or wrong, like/don’t like. It is called dual thinking – and has proved to be quite useful. Science is based on such logical distinctions; computers depend on it.

But it misses much of the richness and complexity of reality. Logic is not wisdom. Interestingly, the truly great breakthroughs in science, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, etc., owe more to creative imagination, even to mistakes, than to logic alone. There is another way of perceiving, of reaching out to the real, to the whole, that has much more to do with ‘both/and’ than with ‘either/or’. 

God sees us as we are – the whole us – without filters. God knows that every cry of anger, of hatred and violence, is the cry of pain. As well as seeing our guilt, God sees the pain, the depths, from where all our reactions proceed. And God’s first response is not judgment but compassion and an irresistible desire to save.

Over time, with persistent practice, we can learn to see ourselves as God sees us. We can begin to imagine the possibility of holding together ‘guilt/forgiveness’, even to succeed in genuinely loving. Wonderfully, as we notice it happening in ourselves, we find it extending gradually to others – “A baptism of repentance/conversion for the forgiveness of sins” – our sins and others’ sins.