Glorifying the Lord for His Mercy, Second Sunday of Advent (A), December 4, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Second Sunday of Advent, Year A
December 4, 2022
Is 11:1-10, Ps 72, Rom 15:4-9, Mt 3:1-12

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 a pilgrimage to the Jordan River, so that we might enroll in the school of St. John the Baptist, hear his message and act on it. At first glance, it seems like a strange choice to meet John at the Jordan, 30 years after Christ’s birth, millennia before his 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 to inaugurate his public ministry. Advent literally means “coming toward,” and in it we ourselves are called to prepare for God’s coming toward us — 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 we need to do?
• When we meet John at the Jordan, he blares, “I am the voice of One crying out in the desert: ‘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 deep potholes and all types of other obstacles. Any time a dignitary would be coming, they would have either to fix the roads or build new ones so that his chariot and the rolling caravan accompanying him could arrive without delay and without hassle. John the Baptist is telling us that to get ready for the Lord who is coming this Advent, 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 on the sometimes hardened terrain of our hearts. It will not be made in the wilderness, but in our day-to-day environs. The work is not something that will make our hands dirty, but our souls clean. The preparatory work John the Baptist is calling us to do is to convert.
• The reason John the Baptist needs to summon us to do this work at the beginning of every new liturgical year is because the one he announced, Jesus, has come into the world is to save us from our sins and from what our sins lead to, death. That’s why John the Baptist’s message is such a gift. Before he was even conceived, the Archangel Gabriel appeared to his dad, Zechariah, and said that John “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 circumcision, 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 the 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” (Mk 1:4). His first words at the Jordan were, as we see in today’s Gospel, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 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, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 4:17).
• The Lord is coming for us in Advent, but for him to reach us, especially at the depth he desires, 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 have the life-changing encounter with us he wishes. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, 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 holes in our prayer life or minimalistic ways of living parts of our faith. We have to straighten out whatever crooked paths we’ve been walking and clean the road of the debris and clutter which can become obstacles to living as the Lord intends. To use Isaiah’s images from the first reading, if we have been behaving as wolves, leopards, lions, cobras and adders toward others, now is the time for us to live in the kingdom that the “little child” to whom Isaiah alludes will guide us, that the shoot that sprouted from the stump of Jesse and filled with the Spirit of the Lord has inaugurated, so that we might live fully by that the same spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge and reverence that filled and rested upon him. This Advent — which is a gift of the Lord to us, and (who knows?) may be our last — will succeed or fail on the basis of how well we convert and clear our lives of sin so that the Lord may come to us without delay or obstacle.
• 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 today. He points us to a new exodus — from death to life, from sin to sanctity — and states very clearly that the path from the desert into the new promised land is, by God’s mercy, repenting.
• In order to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight his paths, however, we have to understand what conversion really means. Often when we hear the word “conversion,” most of us think of the sins to which we’re vulnerable and how we have to excise them from our life. But conversion is much greater than a minor or major course correction in our life. It’s actually meant to be a death and resurrection in which we stop living for ourselves and begin to live for, through, with and in God. This point was made very clearly by the future Pope Benedict XVI in a powerful homily for the Jubilee of Catechists in Rome during the great Jubilee of the Year 2000. Basing himself on John the Baptist’s Advent call, he said, “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 judge not merely according to the current opinions. Therefore, to convert means not to live as all the others are living, not to do what all are doing, not to feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others are doing the same. [It means to] begin to see one’s life through the eyes of God, and so 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 convert means] to look for a new style of life, a new life.” He made this summons totally Christocentric. Jesus calls us to repent because the kingdom of God is at hand, and Cardinal Ratzinger says the the “Kingdom of God is not a thing, a social or political structure, a utopia. The Kingdom of God is God. Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our—in my life.” He continued, “At the beginning of his public life Jesus says, ‘I have come to evangelize the poor’ (Luke 4:18). This means, ‘I have the response to your fundamental question. I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness. Rather: I am that path.’” To convert means to follow Jesus who is the way. To adopt his style of life as our own. It means to seize the new life he came into the world to give.
• There’s a temptation we face that John the Baptist confronts straight on in today’s Gospel: it’s the temptation to think that we don’t really need to repent, that we don’t really need God’s forgiveness, or at least don’t need it very much. The Scribes and the Pharisees thought they were exceptions to John’s call for conversion. They were going out to the Jordan to hear John, who had become quite a phenomenon, but they were not really open to personal repentance because they didn’t think they required it. The Baptist exposed their hypocrisy in unmitigated, candid and incandescent ferocity: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” Sometimes we, like the Scribes and the Pharisees, can have a similar blindness to our own sins and fail to see the urgent need for repentance. We can say, “We are children of God. … God loves us unconditionally, just as we are. … Therefore, we don’t really need to change.” The Baptist reminds us that God can raise up children of God from rocks and that we shouldn’t let our Christian dignity, the awesome reality of our baptism or even our vocation in the Church to become an excuse for us not to realize that we have to strive, always, to live up to that dignity and become truly the likeness of God, who is “holy, holy, holy.” John tells us that we need to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” We can’t stay, therefore, at the level of a “general repentance,” recognizing that we “perhaps like everybody else” have our faults and failings, without doing anything about it. If we truly are repentant, that must show itself in actions — in “fruit” — and the fruit of repentance that God wants most is clear. St. John points it out. He told the people, “Behold one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.” 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 could once again don his camel hair garments and leather belt and speak to us here today, he would, I think, capture our attention and proclaim, “Behold the One of whom I was speaking! Behold the Lamb of God, who comes to take away your sins and the sins of all” and his hands would point to Christ’s presence in the confessional through the same priests through whom Jesus gives us his body and blood. The fruit of repentance that God wants to see in us this Advent is a good confession and the new life that flows from that sacramental gift.
• One of the most insidious lies of the evil one in some parts of the Church today is to convince them that the Sacrament of Confession is an optional part of the Catholic faith. Various recent surveys have shown that about 45 percent of Catholics never go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and another 30 percent go less than once a year, which is the minimum established by the Code of Canon Law and the Precepts of the Church. 38 percent of daily Mass goers, 73 percent of Sunday Mass goers, and 94 percent of irregular Mass going Catholics either never receive the Sacrament or receive it less than once a year (CARA). The evil one has a vested interest in keeping us from the Sacrament of Penance because he wants us to live and die in our sins and absolutely not be forgiven of them. Far more than trying to get us to commit specific sins, he really desires us to become hardened sinners through not repenting and coming to the Lord who wants to cleanse us in his mercy and to bring good even out of the sins we have committed. Jesus said clearly in the Gospel that only the sick need a doctor, that only sinners need a savior, and the devil wants to get us to buy the lie that we really don’t need Jesus to save us from our sins.
• Pope Francis has worked very hard to oppose this diabolical lie. I’ll never forget his first Sunday as Pope. I was in Rome doing color-commentary for the papal conclave for EWTN television. He said, “God never tires of forgiving us. It’s we who tire of asking for forgiveness.” And he prayed: “May we never tire of asking for what God never tires to give.” He himself has said openly that he goes to confession at least every two weeks. Catholics who really are trying to grow in their faith would be urged to come to confession at least a month, but minimally to make a very good confession at least every Advent and Lent. Pope Francis hears confessions in St. Peter’s Basilica each Lent and sometimes during World Youth Day. In 2015-2016, he proclaimed a Jubilee of Mercy so that we could also focus on the gift of God’s merciful love and sent out 1,100 priests across the world as Missionaries of Mercy, giving them the ability to forgive even the most serious sins — like desecrating the Eucharist — that are reserved to him and asking them to become signs of God’s mercy through their dedication to the Sacrament of Confession, through preaching about Mercy, and through the practicing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. After the Jubilee of Mercy was over, Pope Francis extended the mandate of the Missionaries of Mercy indefinitely, and there are now about 700 out of the 414,000 priests in the world. I am humbled to be one of them. That’s one of the reasons why I spend a lot of time in the Confessional here, offering the Sacrament of God’s forgiveness six days a week, hearing many others by appointment at my office at St. Paul’s, and adding extra hours during the Advent and Lenten seasons, like I’ll do on Tuesday, December 13, when I will hear confessions from 9 in the morning through 6 in the afternoon, stopping only to celebrate daily Mass at 12:10. My hope is to make God’s mercy as accessible and easy as possible for you to receive. Please put me to work!
• In the Confessional here, you can go either anonymously or face-to-face, whichever you prefer. In the newsletter today, but also in the racks back by the Confessional, I have put in an Examination of Conscience pamphlet that I prepared with the help of the student board members of Columbia Catholic Ministry to help you prepare well. It has in it a “How to Go to Confession” sheet in case it’s been a long time since your last confession and you need a refresher of how to go without having to worry about how to go. I also put in the newsletter a Frequently Asked Question Sheet about the Sacrament of Penance in case you have questions like why we need to go to a priest for confession, what’s the difference between mortal and venial sins, and the rest. Please give it a read, not only so that you can grow in your knowledge and love of what Jesus wishes to give us in this Sacrament but so that you can be an ever more effective apostle for Christ in bringing others to receive his mercy, too.
• That’s the last point I’d like to make. If we’re really going to live out the Advent summons the Church gives us, we cannot stop at merely making a good confession ourselves. We are also summoned to become like John the Baptist in helping others to prepare the way for the Lord as well, to become a voice of Jesus the Word crying out for us to make straight the paths for him to come. St. Paul said in today’s second reading, “Christ became a minister of the circumcised … so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.” For those of us who follow Christ, who love him, we must bring people to that minister so that all nations may praise God for his merciful love. That’s what St. Paul spent his life doing. After his famous conversion, he became, as he wrote to the Corinthians, an Ambassador for Christ, God as it were appealing through him, imploring everyone on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God (2 Cor 5:20). After our Advent conversion, we, too, are called to be such ambassadors for Christ, such heralds for the Lamb, such voices for the Word crying out in the desert to clear the road of everything unfit not just for his arrival into our lives but for the continuation of the journey as we, and others, seek to follow him who is the Way. And Jesus has taught us how important this work is to him. In Luke 15, where Jesus gives us the three parables of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Prodigal Son, he tells us that “heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner.” Pope Francis has told us many times, “God’s greatest joy is forgiving!” The way we can please God most is by coming to receive his forgiveness and bringing many others we know — our roommates, friends, fallen away Catholics and others — to Jesus. He is the Lamb of God, who entered our world the first time to take away our sins, who remains in the world forgiving us 70 times 7 times through his priests, and who will return again at his Second Coming hoping to take those who have sought to follow him along the path of mercy to the eternal home he has gone to prepare.
• That’s why Catholics on this day sing with joy each year the Good News of God’s Mercy announced by his precursor: “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 Lord is coming. Let’s make straight his path. And help all nations, beginning with those at Columbia, glorify him for his mercy.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomed you,
for the glory of God.
For I say that Christ became a minister of the circumcised
to show God’s truthfulness,
to confirm the promises to the patriarchs,
but so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.
As it is written:
Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles
and sing praises to your name.

When he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees
coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers!
Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?
Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.
And do not presume to say to yourselves,
‘We have Abraham as our father.’
For I tell you,
God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.
Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees.
Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit
will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
I am baptizing you with water, for repentance,
but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I.
I am not worthy to carry his sandals.
He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fan is in his hand.
He will clear his threshing floor
and gather his wheat into his barn,
but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

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