Preparing the Way of the Lord, Second Sunday of Advent (A), December 4, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
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 put it into action in our lives. At first glance, it seems like a strange choice to meet him at the Jordan, 30 years after Christ’s birth, millennia beforehis 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?
• When we meet him at the Jordan, John 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 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 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. What John the Baptist is calling us to is conversion.
• To preach conversion is the mission of the Baptist, which is why we encounter him every Advent. The reason is because 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. His whole vocation, his whole mission, was to deliver that message. Before he was even conceived, the Archangel Gabriel 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 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 has come near.” 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 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 lives. 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, the one filled with the Spirit of the Lord, so that the same spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge and reverence that filled and rested upon him may fill and remain within us. 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.
• 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, converting.
• But in order to prepare the way of the Lord and make straight his paths, we have to understand what conversion means. Often when we hear the word “conversion,” most of us think of sin and eradicating it. But conversion is actually positive: it means first and foremost looking toward Christ and seeking to live with him. It’s not enough just to eliminate sin; Christ wants us to love. This point was made very clearly by Cardinal Ratzinger in a powerful 2000 catechetical address 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 not merely judge according to the current opinions. Therefore, to convert means: not to live as all the others live, not do what all do, not feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; begin to see one’s life through the eyes of God; thereby 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.” He went on to focus all of us on Jesus. The Kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurates, he said, “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 on that path. This is the conversion Jesus wants of us.
• In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist wants every one of us to know that we need that forgiveness. We all need to repent. 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. They thought they didn’t need it. The Baptist exposed their hypocrisy in unmitigated candor: “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 is 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. … 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, or even our vocation in the Church, become an excuse for us not to realize that we have to strive, always, to live up to that dignity, to become truly the likeness of God, who is “holy, holy, holy.” He 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 “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 today, he would, I think, say, “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 his priests.
• But if we’re really going to live out this Advent summons the Church gives us at the beginning of each new liturgical year, we cannot stop at merely making a good confession ourselves. We also have to become like John the Baptist in helping others to prepare the way for the Lord as well, to become a voice a Word crying out for us to make straight the paths for him to come. At the end of today’s first reading, Isaiah tells us that when Christ comes, he will be set up as a “signal for the nations” and the Gentiles shall seek him out. This is what we sing in the O Antiphon every December 19 as we say to Christ, “O Radix Iesse, qui stas in signum popolurum,” “O Root of Jesse, you who stand as a sign to the people.” He is the sign of Jonah, calling us to repentance. He does this especially on Calvary as he becomes the eternal sign showing us how much he was willing to do as the Lamb of God to take away our sins and indicating to us how in fact our sins have been forgiven. As 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. 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 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 for his arrival.
• The Lamb of God has come into the world to take away our sins. He has come to call sinners to repentance. That is why this message of the Baptist is such “Good News” and not bad news. A new life through the forgiveness of sins is possible. We’re able to leave Egypt and enter the promised land. And we relive this mystery every Mass as approach the Root of Jesse who has become a sign for the nations and receive his body and blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. That’s why Catholics on this day sing with joy, “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: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download