Second Sunday of Advent

Dominica II Adventus B
10 December 2023

 If you can recall how Advent started with last Sunday’s Gospel passage, you might be experiencing some “evangelical whiplash”.  A new liturgical year, a new season, began last Sunday with Advent.  Yet, that weekend’s Gospel was a selection more toward the end of St. Mark’s Gospel and maintained the theme of the coming judgement with the awaited return of the Lord in glory.  This Sunday’s Gospel selection sort of violently throws us back to the opposite pole of Advent.  The selection comes from the first verses of St. Mark’s Gospel and it seems more “advent-y” since we hear of the great Advent figure of St. John the Baptist, and the call to prepare the way of the Lord.  We are back to the beginnings with the Gospel selection this weekend and that can serve as a theme for us and the spiritual renewal we need in Advent to prepare anew the way of the Lord in our own daily lives, in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

It is clear from the Gospel selection that something about St. John the Baptist’s location, his proclamation, and his appearance hit a nerve such that great numbers of people were coming out to him.  The Gospel tells us that St. John appeared “in the desert” and that he was baptizing people “in the Jordan River.”  The details of St. John’s location can serve as signals that pointed Jews of his time back to the Exodus.  When God began to execute that foundational saving event of the Exodus by bringing His people out of Egypt, where did the Hebrew people go?  They went out into the desert.  They journeyed there 40 years as God sought to train them to break their connection to Egypt, to be trained in His law, and to move away from slavery and toward the Promised Land.  And where did the Exodus end?  It ended at the Jordan River as the twelve tribes crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land.  We can say that the action of St. John is equivalent to calling Jews back to the beginnings of their foundational experience of salvation in the Exodus.  St. John’s preaching and administering of a baptism of repentance at the Jordan River can serve to call God’s people back to this pivotal place in their history and, at the same time, to announce that a new exodus is arriving.  This gospel scene is an opportunity for God’s people to be renewed in their covenant so that they are ready for how God will still fulfill His promises and more perfectly bring about redemption by the arrival of the “one mightier” than St. John, who is to come.  And no surprise, then, that if you read further into the Gospels after Jesus has engaged in his preaching and is nearing his arrival in Jerusalem for crucifixion, that event is marked by the imagery of Passover and exodus.  In fact, St. Luke in the Transfiguration account even indicates that Moses and Elijah appear alongside Jesus speaking to him about his exodus (Lk. 9:30-31).

The ministry of St. John called multitudes back to their beginnings to be renewed in repentance and the forgiveness of sins, so that they would be prepared for the new thing God desired to do by His sacrifice on the Cross and his passage, as through the Red Sea or the veil torn open in the Temple, ushering the way into the everlasting promised land of heaven.  The Gospel selection likewise serves as a call to us to return to our beginnings when we were brought out of slavery to sin, passing through the waters of baptism, and given the hope of crossing that final Jordan into heaven.  We exist in the time of the new exodus accomplished by Jesus.  We have been brought into that most perfect covenant of salvation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We have been redeemed.  Yet, like God’s people returning time and again to the poison of Egypt, we are inclined to sin and struggle to remain alive and faithful to the New Covenant.  We also need to go back to our beginnings. We also need to hear the call to repentance.  We also need the forgiveness of our sins.  We also need to respond in great multitudes to this urgent Advent call to be prepared.  The Lord’s first arrival accomplished the salvation of the Cross and ushered in the power of the sacraments.  We need to remain in that covenant gift and we need to renew ourselves in that fountain of sacramental grace flowing from the Lord’s open side on the Cross so that we are prepared for the Lord’s return in glory and our final passage to the heavenly promised land.

With good reason the Church teaches us that one of the values of confession and sacramental absolution is that we are restored to baptismal grace (cf. CCC 1446).  We are called back to our beginnings in confession.  We are called back to that first gift of the forgiveness of sins.  After baptism we struggle with sin and we are inclined to sin.  After baptism, we commit sins for which we bear personal responsibility.  Such sins also need to be forgiven.  Like St. John’s ministry in today’s passage, we are called back to our beginnings in this holy season.  God is not done with us.  And we must prepare for His return in glory as Judge.  We pray so frequently, even daily, in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our trespasses”.  How foolish it would be to make such a request but then to never return, or to rarely return, to our beginnings where Jesus has indicated his gift of forgiveness and mercy exists, where it is found, is heard with our ears, and where it is granted in the sacrament of confession.

The preaching of St. Peter in the second reading likewise proclaims this call to repentance and the coming day of judgment.  The Lord “is patient with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.  But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a mighty roar and the elements will be dissolved by fire, and the earth and everything done on it will be found out…. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.”