Becoming Pure and Blameless for the Day of Christ, Second Sunday of Advent (C), December 8, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Second Sunday of Advent, Year C
December 8, 2024
Bar 5:1-9, Ps 126, Phil 1:1:4-6.8-11, Lk 3:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• On the second Sunday of Advent each year, the Church leads us on pilgrimage to the Jordan River, so that we might enroll in the school of St. John the Baptist, hear his message and put it into action. At first glance, it seems like a strange choice to meet him at the Jordan, 30 years after Christ’s birth, millennia before Jesus’ Second Coming. But the reason why the Church always visits John at the Jordan is because he was the one chosen by God the Father from all eternity to get his people ready to receive His Son, who was already walking toward the Jordan River to inaugurate his public ministry. Advent, as you know, literally means “coming toward,” and in it we ourselves are called to prepare for God’s coming toward us — in history, mystery and majesty, as we say: in the past, 2000 years ago in Bethlehem; in the future, with power and great glory on the clouds of heaven; and in the present, in his Word, in the Eucharist, and in grace. The preparatory work announced by John is the way we’re called to get ourselves ready to receive the Lord who is coming. What is that work?
• When we meet him at the Jordan, John blares, “I am the voice of One crying out in the desert.” He didn’t say, “I am one crying out in the desert,” but rather, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert.” John is the loudspeaker, the spokesperson; who is the “one crying out?” It’s the word, Christ Jesus himself. John’s message is God’s message, which John was screaming at the top of his powerful lungs. The message was urgent and clear: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” In the ancient world, the roads were a mess. Every time there was a battle, the roads would be attacked and bridges destroyed, to try to stop the advance of the enemy. The weather took its toll as well, leading to all types of serious potholes and other obstacles. Any time a dignitary would be coming, they would have either to fix the roads or build new ones so that the rolling caravan accompanying him could arrive without delay or hassle. John the Baptist is telling us that to get ready for the Lord whom we are constantly bidding to come this Advent— “Maranatha!,” “Come, Lord Jesus!,” “O Come Divine Messiah!,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” — we, too, need to prepare a way for him. We, too, need to make straight the paths. In the ancient world, preparing such a path meant a great deal of manual work, making crooked paths straight, rough ways smooth, and even charting paths through the mountains and valleys. For us, that pathway will not be traced on the ground, but in our hearts. It will not be made in the wilderness, but in our life. The work is not something that will make our hands dirty, but our souls clean. John the Baptist is calling us to
• To preach conversion is the mission of the Baptist, which is why we encounter him every Advent, because in Advent this message must be preached and conversion must be practiced. The reason is because Jesus has come into the world to save us from our sins and from what our sins lead to, death. The very name, Jesus, means “God saves.” In order for us to appreciate our Savior and what he did for us, we have to realize that we are “great sinners … by our own most grievous fault” who need Him to save us from our sins. That’s why John the Baptist’s message is such a gift. His whole vocation, his whole mission, was to deliver that message. Before he was even conceived, the Archangel Gabriel had said to his dad, Zechariah, “He will turn the hearts of many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah, he will go before the Lord, to turn … the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Lk 1:16-17). Nine months later at his birth, Zechariah exclaimed, “You, my child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins” (Lk 1:76-77).  When the Baptist arrived at the Jordan, he fulfilled those prophecies, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of their sins,” as we read in today’s Gospel.  His first words at the Jordan were “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 3:2). Those were the identical words that Jesus himself would use to inaugurate his public ministry a little later, after his forty-day retreat in the desert (Mt 4:17). Thus, John was indeed the voice of Jesus crying out in the desert for “repentance” through the forgiveness of our sins. That voice and that word continue to echo live
• The Lord is coming for us in Advent, but for him to reach his destination, we have to convert. “To make straight the paths of the Lord” means to clear the path of sin, which is the major obstacle for the Lord to come into our life. Quoting the prophet Isaiah (Is 40:4), John the Baptist says, “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth” (Lk 3:5). We have to call those topographical formations by their proper names. We have to make low the mountains of our pride and egocentrism. We have to fill in the valleys that come from a shallow prayer life, a minimalistic way of living our faith, a superficial way of living friendship. We have to straighten out whatever crooked paths we’ve been walking: if we’ve been involved in some secret sinful behaviors, the Lord calls us through John the Baptist to end them; if we’ve been engaged in some dishonest practices, we’re called to straighten them out and do restitution; if we’ve been harboring grudges or hatred, or failing to reconcile with others, now’s the time to clear away all the debris; and if we’ve been pushing God off the side of the road, if we’ve been saying to Him that we don’t really have the time for him, now’s the time to get our priorities straight.
• And this is not just our work, but God’s, as Baruch tells us in the first reading. Baruch, the secretary of Jeremiah (Jer 36:4), was writing for the Jews exiled in Babylon words of consolation that they would return from the place to which their sins had led them. Speaking to Jerusalem as if it were a person, he urged, “Look to the east and see your children gathered … at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God. Led away on foot by their enemies they left you; but God will bring them back to you, borne aloft in glory as on royal thrones. For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.” This points to how God was going to clear the path for his children, that he was going to treat them as royal dignitaries and call them home. We might think the Advent project of making straight the paths is primarily our work of straightening things out for Jesus to come to us, but Baruch helps us to see it’s primarily God’s work making possible our being able to come to him, to return to his holy city, his dwelling place. That’s why in the Psalm today, we repeat “The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy!,” as we exclaim that the Lord has brought back the captives of Zion, filled our mouths with laughter and tongues with rejoicing, restoring our fortunes, turning our tears into joy, converting our seeds into sheaves. The Advent road repair that has to take place, the work of conversion, is ultimately a great work of divine mercy given to us by God to bring us from slavery to sanctity, from sterility to fruitfulness, from sadness to rejoicing, from shame to glory.
• There’s a reason why John the Baptist preached at the Jordan River. It was more than just a source of water where he could baptize. The Jordan river was the place that represented the border between the desert — where the Jews wandered aimlessly for 38 years after centuries of slavery in Egypt— and the Promised Land. By preaching his message there, John was inviting the Jews of his day to come out of the bondage of slavery, to leave their faults and wandering, sinful lives behind, and enter into the promised land full of God’s blessings. The Baptist preaches the same thing to us perpetually. He points us to a new exodus —from sin to sanctity, from death to life — and states very clearly that the path from the desert into the new promised land is conversion and the forgiveness of sins.
• First, conversion. During the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000, the future Pope Benedict gave a homily to catechists from around the world assembling in Rome. He focused on how the first message the Church must proclaim to the world and live is this message of John the Baptist that we hear at the beginning of every new liturgical year, the message to “repent and believe.” He commented very powerfully on what conversion really is: “The fundamental content of the Old Testament is summarized in the message by John the Baptist: metanoete – Convert! There is no access to Jesus without the Baptist; there is no possibility of reaching Jesus without answering the call of the precursor, rather: Jesus took up the message of John in the synthesis of His own preaching: [repent and believe]. The Greek word for converting means: to rethink – to question one’s own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one’s life; to not merely judge according to the current opinions. Therefore, to convert means: not to live not as all the others live, not to do what all do, not to feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; it means to begin to see one’s life through the eyes of God; thus looking for the good, even if uncomfortable; not aiming at the judgment of the majority, of men, but on the justice of God – in other words: to look for a new style of life, a new life.”
• One of the biggest challenges for the Church is that so many Christians try to live like everyone else does rather than as Christ does, as the saints do. Rather than allow our faith to be leaven that lifts the whole world up, the contaminants of the world enter our hearts, our homes and even our Churches. We take our categories not from God but from worldly gurus. The venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who died 45 years ago tomorrow and for whose beatification we continue to pray, used to say that once upon a time only Catholics believed in the Immaculate Conception. “Now everyone believes he’s immaculately conceived!” The world doesn’t like conversion, so we downplay our need for it, pretending that we’re not sinners, or that we don’t need God’s forgiveness, or that we don’t need to travel the road of conversion God established for us to seek and find that mercy.
• Today, St. John the Baptist, tells us all of our need to turn away from our worldly standards, sins and idols, to reach out for God’s mercy, and to begin truly believing in Jesus, walking with him, basing our entire existence on him and spreading his life to others. Conversion, as the future Pope Benedict said, means to rethink and question our own way of life, to make the commitment not to live as the crowds live but as Christ and his saints live, not to feel justified simply because we can point to a poll that everyone else is living that way, but to begin to see our whole life through the eyes of God and make the love of God and others for real the measure and the criteria of our life. This is a message each of us is called to ponder and act upon in a more profound way.
• The second aspect is the forgiveness of sins. John the Baptist’s mission was not merely to announce the need for repentance, but to point out how sins would be forgiven. He told the people, “One more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals” (Mk 1:7). A short time later, he saw that “more powerful one” coming to him at the Jordan and exclaimed, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (Jn 1:29). If John were physically present here today, dressed in camel hair and his leather belt, he would say to us, “Behold the One of whom I was speaking! Behold the Lamb of God, who comes to take away your sins and the sins of the world” and his hands would point to us both to the baptismal font where our need for forgiveness is met by God’s merciful power and then to Christ’s presence in the confessional through his priests, where the Lamb of God takes away our sins, the sins for which he paid such a precious price on Calvary. We’re much better off than John the Baptist’s first listeners. For them physically to make straight the paths, to level the mountains, to fill in the valleys, rebuild the bridges, and straighten the roads was infinitely more complicated then than it is now, with dump trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, the army corps of engineers and so much more. Spiritually it’s so much easier too. We don’t have to repair roads with our bare hands, with buckets of dirt, primitive hand tools and, if we’re lucky, a few oxen; God provides the heavy equipment. Because as Baruch reminds us, it’s ultimately God’s work. It’s in the sacrament of penance that God himself goes in, with all the power of heaven, to do all the heavy lifting. He will give us the grace to trust in his mercy, to make a thorough examination of conscience, to confess our sins sincerely, humbly and courageously, and to resolve to make our confession a true conversion of life, allowing him to draw good even out of our sins, turning our seeds into sheaves and sorrow into joy.
• In today’s epistle, St. Paul prays for the Christians that the work of conversion and forgiveness of sins continue so that we can live the new style of life that is the fully Christian one. He prays that “the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.” That “good work” is one of non-stop conversion, as we seek to turn away from sin, turn toward God and turn with God in all aspects of our life. St. Paul specifies what the fruit of that “good work” is: “This is my prayer: that your love may increase more and more, … so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.” God wants us to be pure and blameless, filled with his righteousness, or, as we will hear tomorrow on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, “holy and immaculate before him.” This is what Baruch means, too, when God through him tells us that he wants us to “put on the splendor of glory from God” and be “wrapped in the cloak of justice from God.”
• That is why this message of the conversion from the Baptist each Advent is such “good news,” because it’s an expression of God’s love giving us a second chance, or a third chance, or a seventy times seventh chance. It’s an announcement that the King is coming and wants to meet us, but he doesn’t want to ambush us by visiting us when our spiritual house is a disaster area deserving of FEMA funds. Through the work of the Baptist continued by the Church, he announces he’s coming and he gives us the chance to clean our house to welcome fittingly such a Guest. The call to conversion is a proclamation that no matter what we’ve done, God’s forgiveness is greater than all our filth, his mercy is greater than any and every human misery. We’re sinners, yes, but God comes to save us from those sins. Heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner, Jesus tells us, than for 99 who never needed to repent, and insofar as the only one who never needed to repent is the Immaculate Mother of God and she pleased God immeasurably by her constant fiat, we begin to see just how central conversion and forgiveness through the Sacrament God established are to God’s whole plans. Conversion and coming to receive God’s mercy is the best way for us to prepare for his coming in the past in Bethlehem. Conversion and coming to receive God’s mercy is the best way for us to prepare for his coming at the end of time or at the end of “our time,” whichever comes first. Conversion and coming to receive God’s mercy is the best way for us to prepare to receive him in the sacraments and prayer, especially in the Holy Eucharist, as we have the awesome privilege to be about to do.
• We finish with the words of the beautiful hymn that so many Catholic parishes sing on this day. It summarizes the message that Jesus crying out in the wilderness gives us each Second Sunday of Advent through John the Baptist, his forerunner, and indicates to us Whom we’re about to receive:

On Jordan’s bank the Baptist’s cry
Announces that the Lord is nigh.
Awake and hearken for he brings
Glad tidings from the King of Kings.  

Then cleansed be every soul from sin,
Make straight the way of God within.
Prepare we in our hearts a home,
Where such a mighty guest may Come.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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