2nd Sunday of Advent 2021
Baruch 5:1-9; Psalm 125; Philippians 1:3-6, 8-11; Luke 3:1-6
John the Baptist is one of the key figures of Advent. Why? “That’s obvious,” I hear you cry. “He was the forerunner of Jesus.”
You are quite right. Bear in mind, though, that he acted as the forerunner twice. Firstly, he was the forerunner in his birth. The visitation to his father Zechariah, his conception against all likelihood, his leaping in his mother’s womb at the presence of the unborn Jesus, and his birth and naming all presaged similar events for Jesus the incarnate Son of God.
At John’s birth, you may recall, his father proclaimed the Benedictus, the prophecy that this child would “go ahead of the Lord, to prepare His ways before Him”. It is this second fulfilment of the forerunner’s role on which we focus today. The first, infantile, fulfilment won’t be in focus until our post-17th December preparation for the Nativity.
So it is the adult John whom we encounter today, preparing the way for the adult Jesus, reminding us that Advent is at least as much about the coming of Jesus here and now, in our daily lives, as it is about His past coming. The call to prepare a way for the Lord is addressed to us as powerfully as it was to John the Baptist.
All three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) quote, or rather misquote, this saying from the prophet whom we call Deutero-Isaiah, or Second Isaiah. All of them say “A voice cries in the wilderness: prepare a way for the Lord”. What the prophet actually wrote was “A voice cries: prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord”.
Either way, the quotation fits the situation encountered by the Baptist, and the situation which we encounter today. The Gospel version emphasises the loneliness of the Baptist: he is a voice crying in the wilderness, a lone voice, as we feel ourselves to be in the world of today. Yet at the same time, the world to which he preaches is a wilderness, as our contemporary world may also be.
I spent the first fortnight of Advent in 1982, helping to deliver a parish mission in Marylebone. As I tramped the streets of north London, attempting to track down the birds of passage who had self-identified as Catholics during the last parish census, which appeared to have been taken while Noah was building the Ark, as I discovered that most of them were long gone, and as I encountered locked doors, or was greeted by uncomprehending voices calling down from upstairs windows, all in the shadow of the rather sinister Paddington Green police station, notorious at the time for the interrogation of IRA suspects, I felt very sharply the sensation of being a voice crying in the wilderness, calling out to an unheeding world.
When Deutero-Isaiah delivered his prophecy, it was in the context of the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, the same context as today’s reading from the prophet Baruch, and the responsorial psalm. This was a triumphant return, the way made easy, in the imagination of both prophets, by the removal of all obstacles, the levelling of the ground.
Like the prophets, John the Baptist imagined the removal of those obstacles which stood in the way of God’s people, and of God Himself. That same John was to play his part in the removal of those obstacles, and so are we. What are the obstacles in the way of the Lord who comes to us today?
Rather than mountains and hills, we encounter indifference, misunderstanding, and hostility. The world, at least here in Europe, has no enthusiasm for the coming of the Christ, for the Kingdom, or Reign, of God. Like the Jewish exiles portrayed in the psalm, we may feel that we are sowing in tears: unlike them, we struggle to imagine ourselves returning full of song, since our harvest appears to be a scanty one. We do not hear the heathen saying “What marvels the Lord worked for them”.
But then again, neither did John the Baptist. Yes, he had initial success—people flocked to him—yet he ended his life in prison under sentence of death. What mattered was not the success or failure of his mission, but his faithfulness to it. His task was to sow, to prepare, to open the way for the One who was to come.
Our task is the same: to be faithful to the call we have received from God. By our prayer, by our way of life, by the steadfastness of our response to the God who calls us, we are to sow seeds, we are to prepare the way for the One who comes after us. That is our Advent mission: not simply to indulge in a sentimental remembrance of His first coming, but to smooth His passage as He comes again.
