Second Sunday of Advent (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, December 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, C, Vigil
December 7, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we meet his forerunner, his herald, Saint John the Baptist, at the Jordan River.
• John was chosen and sent by God the Father to get his people ready to receive Jesus when he at last openly manifested himself to begin his public ministry. At the Jordan, John blared, not, “I am one crying out in the desert,” but rather, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert.” John was the loudspeaker, the spokesperson. The “one crying out” was of course the word, Christ Jesus himself, who was about to spend 40 days on retreat in that very Judean desert. John’s message, therefore, was 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 and without hassle. John the Baptist is telling us that to get ready for the Lord whom we are constantly bidding to come 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. Quoting the Prophet Isaiah, John 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. We have to straighten out whatever crooked paths we’ve been walking: if we’ve been involved in some secret sins or sinful behaviors, the Lord calls us through John the Baptist to end it; if we’ve been involved 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. The gift of Advent 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 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 this Sunday. 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 through conversion and the forgiveness of sins. To convert means more than to eliminate a bad habit. The Greek word for conversion is metanoete, which means to rethink and question one’s whole way of living, judging not according to polls and the lives of celebrities but seeing our whole life through the eyes of God and striving to make the love of God and others the measure and the criteria of our life. To convert means resolving to live the way Jesus Christ lived and taught us to live. It ultimately means a death and resurrection in which we die to the old Adam and begin to live a new life with Christ by means of the forgiveness of sins.
• One of the biggest challenges for the Church in the United States is so many Christians are trying to live like everyone else does, rather than as Christ does and the saints do. Rather than allow our faith to be leaven that lifts the whole world up, we permit the toxins of the world to 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 this Monday — my predecessor for 16 years as the National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, and for whose beatification we ardently pray — used to say that once upon a time only Catholics believed in the Immaculate Conception. “Now everyone believes he’s immaculately conceived!” Because the world, in other words, doesn’t like conversion, we downplay our need for it, pretending that we’re not sinners who need God’s forgiveness. We live in a self-affirmation age in which many want to avoid taking responsibility for their choices, a therapeutic age in which we run to counselors and psychiatrists and psychologists trying to deal with our guilt and often with the consequences of our own and others’ sinful choices but without going to Jesus and those he has sent out to absolve our guilt and take away the sins of the world. This Sunday, St. John the Baptist, tells all of us of our need to turn away from our worldly standards, our sins, our idols, to reach out for God’s mercy, and to begin truly believing in Jesus, basing our life on him, walking with him, and helping others to join him and us.
• John the Baptist’s mission, however, was not merely to announce the need for repentance and conversion, but to point out how sins would be forgiven. It wasn’t just baptism in the Jordan, which, at his time, was just a sign of the need for the forgiveness of sins, but without the power yet to remove those sins. John 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 among us in 2024, 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 the confessional where the Lamb of God, through his priests, continues to take away our sins for which he paid such a precious price on Calvary. We’re much better off than John the Baptist’s first listeners. Just as for them to make straight the paths, level the mountains, fill in the valleys, rebuild the bridges, and straighten the roads in earthly life was infinitely more complicated than it is now, with dump trucks, backhoes, bulldozers, the army corps of engineers and so much more, so spiritually it’s likewise much easier. 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. It’s in the Sacrament of Penance where he himself, with all the power of heaven, does most of the lifting. One of the most important things we need to do during Advent is make a thorough confession, where we examine for the peaks that need to be flattened, the deep holes that need to be filled, the serpentine ways that need to be straightened and then come to the Lord for mercy.
• The offer of divine mercy is why the Baptist’s message of conversion each Advent is such “good news,” It’s an expression of God’s love, his 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 and the Church, God announces that he’s coming and he gives us the chance, not to mention his help, to clean our house to welcome him fittingly. 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 Mother of God — whose Immaculate Conception we will celebrate on Monday with a Holy Day of Obligation — and we know that 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 are 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 most fitting means 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 are the most appropriate Advent practices for us to prepare to receive him in the sacraments and prayer, especially in the Holy Eucharist.
• On the Second Sunday of Advent each year, I love to finish with the words of the beautiful hymn that so many Catholic parishes sing on this day. They summarize the entire message that Jesus, crying out in the wilderness, gives us each Second Sunday of Advent through John the Baptist, his forerunner: “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.” That mighty guest is coming. Let’s get ready interiorly to run out to meet him!

The Gospel passage on which this homily was based was: 

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