Second Sunday of Advent, December 10, 2023

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There was and is good news in our lives; how are we good news for others?

Mark 1:1–8

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ [the Son of God].

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way. A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths,’” John [the] Baptist appeared in the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.

John was clothed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist. He fed on locusts and wild honey.

And this is what he proclaimed: “One mightier than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the holy Spirit.”

Music Meditations

Opening Prayer

From the liturgy for the Second Sunday of Advent:

Oh God, whose will is social justice for the poor and peace for the afflicted,
let your herald’s urgent voice pierce our hardened hearts and announce the dawn of your kingdom.
Before the advent of the one who baptizes with the fire of the Holy Spirit, let our complacency give way to conversion, oppression to justice, and conflict to acceptance of one another in Christ.
We ask this through him whose coming is certain, whose day draws near:
Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever
Amen.

Companions for the Journey

Adapted from First Impressions, a service of the Southern Dominican Province, 2002 and 2008:

The gospel tells us that it’s in the desert where the messenger and message are to be found. And there in the desert the voice is “crying out”—trying to get our attention. A woman at the door of a church said to me recently, “Please say a prayer for me, I’m going through a desert time in my life.” She didn’t have to say much more than that; the expression on her face and the term she used to describe what she was experiencing, were enough. Life had taken an unexpected turn in the road; it had taken her out to the desert. Not a trip she wanted to take; nor would I! Was it her advanced age and its subsequent ailments; had she lost her husband; was she alienated from any of her children; was her prayer dry and without consolation? Has covid-19 been devastation for her and her family? Deserts don’t come in any “one-size-fits-all.” Some desert sojourns last a long time; others may be very intense and mercifully brief. Some are inner spiritual desolations, when faith seems to offer no solace. Others are outer struggles when life’s sureties collapse and the old supports fail us. But, as difficult as desert periods are, the scriptures today suggest they may also be the place we meet the messenger from God, with a message we need to hear. Somehow and somewhere, Isaiah says, God will come to us and lead us through our current deserts. As difficult as the desert is for us, the prophet promises that there the “glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” Where we are most vulnerable, there God’s power will be felt. Perhaps God won’t provide a quick escape hatch, instant relief, but the tender God the prophet describes is concerned about exiles and refugees who see a long desert journey ahead of them.

Today’s selection from Mark is the Prologue to the gospel. Notice what is missing in the opening of Mark’s gospel: no Annunciation, no journey to Bethlehem, no stable, no angels, no Herod, no Kings! Mark’s gospel starts with John the Baptist signaling the beginning of Jesus’ public career. Before the story gets going and a cast of characters enters the scene, Mark gives the reader an inside piece of information. We learn a lot about Jesus in these first eight verses and are immediately told that Jesus is “the Son of God.” He is empowered with the Holy Spirit and ready to give it to those who accept him. He is not just a shadow or echo from the past for us. This Jesus is God’s way of opening a whole new future for us. God the Creator is ready to start again with us; to remake us. We don’t have to be stuck in our old selves for, while John baptized with water, Jesus will bring God’s Spirit and recreate us from within. Strange place for the crowds to go to hear a message of renewal—the desert. There was a temple in Jerusalem that could have been the place for people to meet their God and be renewed. Instead, the renewal and fiery encounter (for that is what God’s Spirit provides) comes in the desert, the place the slaves fleeing Egyptian bondage first met and got to know their God. It is where God still wants to meet us, in the place where we are stripped of distractions and ready and anxious to listen. In the desert all our facades are removed.

Mark tells us today that the desert places may very well be a suitable place to hear God speaking to us—and what we hear there is good news for desert travelers. He links us to Deutero-Isaiah’s words as he evokes the Israelite desert times. In the desert, the Israelites were asked to believe that God was going to bring them home, to a permanent place of security and intimacy with God. John the Baptist’s voice announces that now the time is at hand when God will fulfill the ancient promises to Israel. Those who heed his voice are to repent, turn from their self-delusions and thoughts that they can make it on their own. John says that God has noticed their plight and that One is coming who will be powerful, where they are weak. This One will pour God’s Spirit into them, to revive their own drooping, discouraged and road-weary spirits. A new road is being cut thought the desert and it is Jesus who will walk with us along it; help us deal with hills and valleys that would make it impossible for us to travel them on our own.

What is dependable and sure are not the events, but the surprising ways God finds to come back into our lives again and again. Can you hear the promise of John the Baptist today; his voice in barrenness and in the empty places? He calls out to us from what feels like desolation, the desert places in our lives. Accustomed to its harshness, he sees our need and makes a promise to us. One is coming (at this moment? This Eucharist? This period of our lives?) who comes with power to breathe a Spirit of God over us and transform us. Who or what else will be our surety, our journey companion in what lies ahead? The events of our lives are not dependable; God is. Here is a desert experience: a woman, who just went through a terrible losing battle with her husband’s cancer, said that through it all she felt the most profound experience of the intimacy, the presence of God, each step of the way. It wasn’t a feeling of warmth, it wasn’t cozy, but it was God, she is sure of it. “A voice cries out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord.”

The dependable One is reaching out to us today through John the Baptist, inviting us to repent. John is preaching to the “chosen people” the very message they preached to others. None of us is superior to the others, there is no room for smugness, no room to look at others we consider inferior. Here is John’s invitation to repent of our useless patterns of living, to be honest about ourselves, to stop maintaining an illusion of innocence. Doing this welcomes in the God of this Advent, the God who will be our dependable source for our newly-born life. If we are ever going to the manger, get to experience the “Spirit of Christmas,” we need to pass through this deserted place, free ourselves of distractions, so that we can hear his call to put aside our guises of respectability and independence and claim our dependable God.

This Gospel begins in a desert, stripped of noise and distractions. John the Baptist touches into their hungers. God has noticed them and sends a powerful prophet to speak to them and invite them to a new way to live with new choices and new goals. John asks for repentance. Hardly sounds like an attractive “sales pitch.” But they come out in droves to hear him and accept his invitation to repent. That’s what they need, a chance to admit they are feeling the forces of other powers. The good news for them is that they can admit their need, ask for repentance and be forgiven. The passage puts it in the right order: first repentance, then, “for the forgiveness of sin.” One follows the other, no doubt about that. The Jesuit biblical scholar John Kavanaugh says that repentance means we have hope. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Things don’t have to be this way forever, they can change, I can start over again. The presence of the Savior also means the rebirth of my fatigued and bloated spirit. That is the joy of Advent.

Further reflection:

Weekly Memorization

Taken from the gospel for today’s session…

Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight His paths

Living the Good News

What action can you take in the next week as a response to today’s reading and discussion?

Keep a private journal of your prayer/actions responses this week. Feel free to use the personal reflection questions or the meditations which follow:

Reflection Questions

  • From Barbara Reid, O.P. in America Magazine:
    What is God speaking to your heart in the hollowed-out spaces of these Advent days?
    What are the signs of a dawning “new creation” that you perceive?
    What obstacles need to be removed to make the way straight for the present coming of our God?
  • From Jude Siciliano, O.P.
    Advent is a time for dreaming big dreams, and so we ask ourselves: What changes must I make in my ways of acting and my ways of thinking as I prepare for the Lord’s coming?
    In what new places will I look for the arrival of the Lord this Advent?
  • The setting of this Prologue to Mark’s gospel is the desert. What is metaphorical about this setting?
  • Can you recall an experience of waiting for someone important in your life to arrive?
    How did you prepare?
    How did you feel?
  • The actual translation of the Greek word Mark uses when he metanoia is not repentance, but conversion or a changing of our mind, or a change of the direction of our life. How is advent a call to metanoia?
  • What are the signs of a dawning “new creation” that you perceive?
  • What obstacles need to be removed to make the way straight for the present coming of our God?
  • Advent is a time for dreaming big dreams, and so I ask myself: What changes must I make in my ways of acting and my ways of thinking as I prepare for the Lord’s coming?
  • In what new places will I look for the arrival of the Lord this Advent?
  • The site of the beginning of this gospel is the desert. What desert am I experiencing right now?
    Is it internal or external?
    Can I fix this desert space it myself?
    Where does God fit in?
    What is God speaking to my heart in the hollowed-out spaces of these Advent days?
  • Recall a time when an important event changed your life. Did you know about it ahead of time?
    If so, how did you prepare?
    If not, how did you respond?

Meditations

A Meditation in the Ignatian Style/Imagination:

As I reflect on this gospel, I try to imagine John the Baptist preaching to the crowds about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: I see a small, wiry man, dressed in rags and tatters. His clothes are dirty and hang off his too-thin frame. They say he eats little—locusts and honey gathered from the parched land he and the other Essene inhabit in the hills. Stranger and stranger. But there is something about the man that forces me to stay and listen to what he has to say. His voice, his eyes, speak eloquently of the passion which drives hiim… The conviction that time is short and the kingdom of Heaven is near rings out over the crowd. He makes us feel that we and the world we inhabit are at a crossroads. Something momentous is upon us. His name is Jesus. We must repent. Repent.
Repentance—Metanoia—more than a confession of sins.
More than guilt and anxiety.
More than fear of the Lord’s wrath.
Metanoia.
A complete change of heart.
To turn one’s very soul around.
Away from self-centeredness, selfishness and self-aggrandizement.
Away from meanness, from sniping at others to make myself more secure.
Away from greed, clutching frantically at what I have, holding it close because of anxiety that there might not be enough.
Enough time, enough money, enough attention, enough love.
We are called to turn our minds and hearts
Away from evil.
From envy of what others have achieved or acquired,
Envy fostered by the fear that someone might just have more of something than I do.
Metanoia.
A turning around.
A turning back.
Back to goodness.
Back to kindness.
Back to loving.
Back to God.

How would I respond to John the Baptist if I were sitting listening to him? What does his life and message say to me?
Would my heart be touched by the Spirit and would I experience the deep conviction that I must, MUST realign my will to God’s and live my life accordingly?
Do I realize the hardships this might entail?
Pleasures I might have to forgo or defenses I might have to abandon in order to be open to God’s call, to God’s living presence?
I sit with this story, trying to integrate it into my own circumstances, my own life. I speak to Jesus about by my desire to change my heart, to forgive, to let go of resentments, to align my heart with his. I give thanks for this time together with him…..

A Meditation in the Augustinian Style/Relationship:

God was present all the time and I did not recognize him. I thought it was darkness but it was light… As excessive light of the sun blinds the human eye, so the excessive light of God plunges man into thick darkness. And God is approached in darkness and emptiness and nothingness simply because He is the mystery of mysteries.

—William Johnston, The Inner Eye of Love: Mysticism and Religion

I think of a dark time in my life when I experienced loss, pain, guilt, confusion, even the absence of God. How long did the period last? Is there any growth in my relationship with God that I am aware of that resulted from this terrible experience? I speak of this time with Jesus who knows so well what it means to suffer. Is there some life issue or relationship issue that is leading me into the “dark night of the soul” at this moment? I take the time to explore this with the Spirit of Light and try to discern what God seems to be asking of me at this time.

A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions

From Sacred Space, a service of the Irish Jesuits:

The attraction of John the Baptist is mysterious. People flocked to him, not to be flattered but to be told the truth. They listened because of what they saw, a man who was indifferent to the world’s prizes, a man of minimal needs, who could not be bought by pleasures, comforts or money, but passionate about God. They recognized holiness. Show me, Lord, what there is about my life that takes from the value of my words and makes me less convincing.

John the Baptist preached forgiveness. This is one of the special gifts of God, and one of the big celebrations of Advent. We are a forgiven people, and we welcome the forgiveness of God in our repentance. This means we are firstly grateful for forgiveness—that we do not have to carry forever the burden of our sin, meanness, faults and failings. God covers them over in mercy.

The second step of welcoming forgiveness is to try to do better in life—to move on from this sinfulness and meanness to a life of care, compassion, love and joy, and to make steps to forgive others.

Poetic Reflection:

Psalms are songs of our call to God out of our individual experiences. The psalms of lament are particularly poignant. In this kind of psalm, we reveal ourselves the way we really are, bringing our questions about injustice and wickedness, our fears about the future. Psalms 17, 10 and 22, for example, are a plea for help when things get overwhelming, and Psalm 51, a true penitential psalm, asks for conversion. We stand before our God, bearing our pain, naked in our wretchedness. This is real prayer. Read one of the psalms of lament then read this poem by Father Ed Ingebretzen in Psalms of the Still Country:

“You Are Hungry”

Father
you are hungry
and we may be nothing in your hands

but let us at least
taste your fire:
let us be ash,
be dross, be waste
in the heat of your desire.

Let us at least
need, and want, and learn
that it is impossible
to want you too much,
to want you too long.

May the heat of our thirst
for you
dry the rivers
reduce the mountains to dust,
thin the air.

God, you who want us
more than we want you,
be a fan to our flame,
the end to our need,
the ocean we seek to drain.

Closing Prayer

Take time to call to mind all those you know who are experiencing particular deserts in their lives right now, reciting after each name you say aloud: “Lord, comfort your people”, or “Lord, give hope to the hopeless”.

Take time to call to mind several people you need to forgive or who need to forgive you, reciting after each name: “Lord, give me patience, understanding and the grace to forgive”, or “Lord, help me in my desire to do better”.

Recite the Lord’s Prayer.