2nd Sunday of Advent 2019
Isaiah 11: 1-10; Romans 15:4-9; Matthew 3:1-12
“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” That is John the Baptist’s message as recorded in today’s Gospel. It is also the message of Jesus. Matthew records Our Lord’s basic proclamation, which scripture scholars refer to as the “kerygma”, in exactly the same words as those used by the Baptist: Mark varies the words only slightly.
So if the Kingdom of heaven (or of God, as Mark puts it) is close at hand, we may be excused for asking “Where is it?” We read Isaiah’s idyllic prophecy of the Kingdom, to be established, it seems, by the Messiah, when the whole of creation will be in harmony, and we scratch our heads in bewilderment.
Nature continues to be red in tooth and claw: meanwhile, humankind, the pinnacle of creation, never ceases to show itself capable of unspeakable vileness. We did not need further terrorist atrocities to remind us that even religion, supposedly rooted in the worship of God, can be a source of practically sub-human evil.
We look around the world, and may gain the impression that violence, hatred, selfishness and sin hold sway almost everywhere. The Holy Land, where John and Jesus declared the closeness of the Kingdom, appears to be a crucible of hatred, with many forces dedicated to the destruction of Israel—and, by extension, of Jews—while the Israeli government, with the support of Trump’s White House, pursues ever more repressive policies towards its Arab citizens.
Latin America is a seething cauldron; China is intent on clamping down on religious freedom at home, while sabre-rattling beyond its frontiers; North Korea is apparently more unhinged than ever; a resurgent Russia seeks to resurrect the Soviet Empire; so-called “populism”, heavily laced with xenophobia, stalks the western world.
In our own country, political discourse has been replaced by vitriolic abuse on social media, on the streets, and even in Parliament; and a looming General Election gives rise to more fear than hope, as the largest parties veer to the extremes. Of the woes and sins of the Church, enough has been said to create widespread dismay.
So, whereas we may understand the Baptist’s (and Our Lord’s) call to repentance, we find it more difficult to recognise that the Kingdom is close at hand. Yet, if we accept the first part of the kerygma, we must also accept the second.
The Kingdom IS close at hand, not only because Christ has come, or even because He will come, but because He DOES come, in every moment and situation of our lives. He is, as Carlo Carretto wrote, the God who comes. He comes to us in other people—He who said “Whatever you did to the least of mine , you did to me”—He comes to us in the moments of anguish, sharing with us His own anguish in Gethsemane and on Calvary; and in the moments of joy, giving us a foretaste of the Resurrection. He comes to us in our times of prayer; in His word, spoken in the Scriptures, and in the sacrament and sacrifice of His Body and Blood and His abiding presence in the tabernacle.
As the great German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote: “And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfilment. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent.”
So the Kingdom is here, and in the light of this reality, we can begin to view our world more positively. We can see the acts of kindness which take place on a large or small scale, and recognise them as signs of the Kingdom. We can see the sacrifice of the victims of the London Bridge terrorist as their final act of commitment to the reclamation of offenders, and as showing that the Kingdom, though present, is far from fully realised. And we can commit ourselves, this Advent, to a new repentance, consisting of a determination to nourish the seeds of the Kingdom, and to open our minds and hearts to recognise and receive the God who comes.
