Tag Archives: Advent

How to Look Forward to God

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From time to time, some of us, probably most of us, are overcome with a feeling that something is about to happen. What it is that is coming is usually vague as in the celebrated song from West Side Story: “Something’s coming, I don’t know what it is/ But it is gonna be great.” Perhaps this longing turns out to be wishful thinking, or maybe something comes but it turns out not to be as great as hoped for. But then there are times when something really does come. John the Baptist proclaimed in the desert a conviction that something momentous was about to happen, even if he didn’t know exactly what it was going to be: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mk. 1: 7–8) With Advent being the time of expectation and preparation, John the Baptist is a focus because of his own vocation of prophetic expectation. So how can we deepen our expectations today through his expectations in his time?

Past history can give us some sense of direction about what might be coming, as it did with John. If a parent tells a child that a special treat is coming, the child’s expectations are fueled by the special treats given previously, even if they don’t make the next treat predictable. Mark quotes the opening verses of Isaiah 40 to indicate the history that fueled his expectations. The verses in Isaiah proclaim the miraculous return of the Israelites to Jerusalem at the end of the Babylonian Exile. This remembered act of deliverance raised hope that God would do yet another great new thing in the present time of need under the Roman occupation which had exiled the Jews in their own country.

As for the present time, John did not know specifically what was coming but, from our vantage point, we know that the infant Jesus had been born and we also know what happened when this child grew up. Does that mean that for us there is no suspense? No. When we read a story for a second or third time, we may know how it ends but we find ourselves understanding much more about what the ending means by going through the story again. Surely none of us have exhausted the meanings of Jesus’ birth and death and resurrection! To give a telling example: John himself seems to have been off the mark when he said someone “stronger” than he was going to come as Jesus was born a helpless infant and Mark stresses Jesus’ weakness on the cross. Or is this weakness an unimaginable strength beyond John’s grasp? The Greek word ischyros used here means physical strength, but it can also refer to spiritual and moral strength. What does all this mean to us? We have much insight and inspiration to look forward to!

Like John, we look to the future with trepidation and hope. The author of Second Peter captures our apprehensions today by predicting that “the heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.” (2 Pet. 3: 10) That does not sound reassuring and surely is not what God wants for us; it is obviously a human possibility. But in the midst of such trials, we have a “new heaven and a new earth” to look forward to. Such a new heaven and new earth is beyond imagining; surely they are not like the mediocre visions of heaven that one literary critic referred to as a move from second class to first class accommodations attested to in bad poems..

Is our hope and expectation hopelessly vague? The prophecy in Isaiah can help us now as much as it helped the Israelites at the time of the return from exile. The road may be rough, but God will make the rugged places a plain. (Is 40: 4) Moreover, God will lead us as a shepherd leads the sheep and, again beyond imagining, “the glory of the Lord will be revealed.”

What do we do in the meantime? One thing we can and must do is wait, poised and ready for something to come. Even the impatient adolescent Tony sang in his song: “Yes it will/ Maybe just by holding still, it’ll be there.” If Tony can hold still until he meets Maria, we can hold still until we meet our God who is surely coming to meet us. The other thing we can and must do is repent. We need to straighten out the rough valleys and hills within ourselves that obstruct a highway of God, and we need to turn away from the ways we inflame the earth and turn to ways we can make the earth new. John preached and enacted a baptism of repentance; Jesus’ first admonition after being baptized himself was: Repent. Repent and wait: that is what Advent is all about. Meanwhile, something is coming from God even if we don’t know what it is.

The Ongoing Coming of Christ

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Scripture readings such as Matthew 24 have some Christians looking forward to what is called a Second Coming of Jesus but have other Christians scratching their heads, trying to figure out what the words of Jesus really mean. As for me, I look forward to Jesus’ coming but these passages in Matthew have me scratching my head a lot and raising some questions.

The scenario of the Second Coming seems to suggest that God is holding back, not doing anything while waiting to see what we humans do about the world and then jumping in with a decisive intervention when we mess things up. But isn’t God vitally present all the time?

The notion that it would be better to be caught doing good when Jesus comes rather than caught doing evil makes some sense but makes God seem more of a threat than a savior. More puzzling is the complacency on the part of some people who neglect pressing social issues such as ecology on the belief that Jesus will come before we destroy the planet. It seems to me that it would be a bad idea to be caught polluting the planet rather than helping to make the planet cleaner if Jesus should return a second time. It is even more troubling when some people think war is a good thing because it will bring on the Second coming, but one would think it would not be good to be caught waging a nuclear war if Jesus comes.

The violence imagined by some in a Second Coming gives the troubling impression that the first coming, when Jesus was crucified, didn’t work out, so the second time round God will jettison the Good Cop scenario and send the Bad Cop who beats up all the bad guys. Hoping for that kind of scenario denies that the Resurrection of the crucified Lord is the defining revelation of God’s Truth and makes the violent avenger the ultimate revelation.

But if we hold fast to the crucifixion and Resurrection as the vital primary truth of what God reveals to us about Godself, then our hope for Christ’s coming will be shaped by the compassion that lead God to become a vulnerable human being who was killed by his fellow humans. The violence on the part of humans in the crucifixion should alert us that the social violence Jesus warns about is done by humans and not by God.

This reflection suggests we should dwell on the first coming, the only coming that we know has happened. And if Christ has already come, Christ is already here and not waiting in the wings to pounce on us later. The name Emmanuel means “God is with us.” St. Benedict tells us that the first step of humility involves remembering that God is always present to us and that we should likewise be present to God. If Jesus is already “God with us” than who needs a second coming? Isn’t the first coming enough? Of course, we all know that we are very capable of being not so present to God and that inattentiveness easily leads to acting in ways we wouldn’t if we were attentive to God’s presence. When we are not being attentive to God, God’s persistent presence will keep pressing in on us until God breaks in on us like a burglar or a thief in the night.

We know that crises in our personal lives and in the larger social arena can break down our usual defenses against the Divine Burglar. It isn’t that God causes these crises just to help us grow spiritually, but God does use these events to enter more deeply into our lives. After all, it is in times of crisis that we are most apt to rethink our lives and ask ourselves what is really important and where our hearts are. These crises, whether natural disasters such as hurricanes or military invasions, also raise these fundamental questions. They also create victims in whom Christ is intensely present. When we meet Christ in the victims of human violence we bring Christ deeper into the world, where Christ wants to be–that is, be with us.

I suggest, then, that we use this season of Advent to open ourselves to God’s presence to us, encouraging Christ to come into our lives. Let us go out to meet the bridegroom by having times of prayer and reflection that give us time with God. Let us meet Christ most intimately in the Eucharist. In all these things, let us look forward to the celebration of the First Coming when Jesus comes among us as a helpless baby in a manger during the coldest time of year. Let us look forward to following Jesus through the following seasons in his ministry and in his cruel death. If there should be a Second Coming, what better preparation can we make for it? We have much to look forward to.

Preparing the Way of the Lord

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Advent is an odd sort of beginning for the liturgical year. In one respect , it is the beginning of the story of Jesus, starting with his conception and St. John the Baptist’s preaching as a forerunner of Jesus, but in another respect, Advent is thought to be about the end of the story, the end of the world with the “second coming” of Jesus. Or is it? John the Baptist is a transitionary character who points to a great good God will do without knowing what it is going to be. Might the “end” of the story really be another transition? Malachi’s image of God being like a refiner’s fire (Mal. 3:2) sounds ominous and violent, a perfect image for God burning up the world in a fit of anger. But a refiner’s fire is not destructive; it is constructive, even healing. As a refiner’s fire restores metals to their best condition, God’s refining fire purifies the sons of Levi so that they can offer their sacrifices. The refining fire is not an ending but a new beginning. In what other ways might the ministry of John the Baptist be a new beginning for us today?

Luke has John begin his preaching with a quote from Isaiah which stands by itself with no elaboration. John’s quote features the leveling of valleys and mountains in order to “prepare the way of the Lord.” The image of leveling can be threatening as it calls up fears of violent revolutionaries leveling everything to the ground out of anger and resentment. But this is not the kind of leveling Isaiah and John are envisioning. Isaiah was proclaiming the leveling of valleys and mountains in order to remove the obstacles between Babylonia and Jerusalem so that the Jews could return safely to their homeland. The way to prepare for the Lord, then, is to remove obstacles that we put between each other. In an online discussion of this reading, it was suggested that one way we smooth the way for others is to create barrier-free access for handicapped people although it was noted that we still have more progress to make since the distance of a barrier-free route can be quite extensive. In any case, this image gives us a small parable of the greater project of removing obstacles placed in the paths of the helpless. One way to do this would be to pass legislation that makes voting easier for people instead of harder. On paper or in a spoken sermon, removing barriers may sound like a calm action, but in reality, we are, first of all, removing obstacles in ourselves that cause us to stumble in the way of the Lord. Since we are likely to find that many of these obstacles have been mistaken for parts of ourselves instead of invasive infections, removing these obstacles may well feel like being refined by fire. Another way to say the same thing is to note that the Way of the Lord is from Empire whether in the household or a nation-state (Babylon) to Jerusalem, the freedom of a new beginning of life without obstacles between each other and God. Hence the importance of Luke meticulously listing the imperial rulers three times in the first three chapters of his Gospel.

In parallel to John’s introducing his ministry with an otherwise unelaborated quote from Isaiah, Luke has Jesus inaugurate his ministry with another quote from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” We do well to place these two quotes side by side as they add up to a fuller program of preparing the way of the Lord by freeing the oppressed from the obstacles we place before them..

In John’s Gospel, John the Baptist famously said of his relationship with Jesus: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (Jn. 3: 30) As my confessor of many years reminded me often, we must be like John the Baptist: decreasing so that Christ may increase within each of us. Letting Christ increase in us, of course has us decreasing ourselves by removing the obstacles in ourselves so as to prepare the way of the Lord.

John’s Offended Puzzlement

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Mattia_Preti_-_San_Giovanni_Battista_PredicazioneJohn the Baptist is so closely associated with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry that it’s easy to see them as two of a kind. Both preached repentance. Both died the death of a martyr.

But if the two of them saw eye to eye, why would John send his disciples to ask Jesus if Jesus was “the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Mt. 11: 3) As is usually the case when asked any kind of question, Jesus gives only an indirect answer. He lists the miracles that are happening such as the blind receiving their sight and the lame walking. Then he caps it off with the cryptic and seemingly incoherent words: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Mt. 11: 6) The implication is that John is taking offense at Jesus, or is in danger of doing so. If Jesus is concerned that John, his onetime mentor, might take offense at him, what about his followers? What about us?

The Greek word used here for “offense” and throughout the New Testament is skandalon. We get the English word “scandal” from it. The word means “a stumbling block” and it particularly applies to conflictual circumstances. In the thought of René Girard, two or more people in conflict are stumbling blocks to one another. In his important book The Scandal of the Gospels, David McCracken examines the concept of scandal at length. Jesus’ challenge in his reply to John’s followers is central to McCracken’s argument that faith and scandal are inextricably entangled. What this amounts to is that “only when the possibility of offense exists will the possibility of faith exist.” Being offended, scandalized by Jesus takes us half-way there. One who is not offended because of indifference has not even started. (McCracken 1994, p.82) On the other hand, someone who is stuck in being scandalized for the sake of being scandalized is not likely to move forward either. The people who were scandalized by both John and Jesus, although for opposite reasons, fit this profile. (Mt. 11: 16–19)

So why might John or we take offence at Jesus? Both Jesus and John called for repentance but John’s warnings were accompanied by images of wrath: an axe at the tree, a winnowing fork, fire. John’s preaching can be heard as a renewal of Isaiah’s prophecy of hope: creating a highway through the desert as God did to bring the Jews back from the Babylonian exile, opening the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, coming with vengeance and “a terrible recompense.” (Is. 35) If we tick the boxes of Jesus’ ministry, there is a check mark for each item except for the “terrible recompense.” There are also no axes, winnowing forks, or fire in Jesus’ preaching. Perhaps John felt like an emcee announcing a dramatic act only to get a puff when he thought he’d get an explosion.

When we think of the people in our lives and public figures who affect us that we sincerely think are “a brood of vipers,” do we want the wrath they are fleeing to fall on them? Are there people we think should be chopped down and thrown into the fire? If we harbor the same vengeful feelings, we are scandalized by these people. How then do we feel about a preaching ministry where the poor and the peacemakers are blessed and we are asked to forgive those who scandalize us? Are we scandalized at the idea of renouncing vengeance against these people? If so, then we are taking offense at Jesus and we are not blessed.

The earnest moral sense and integrity of John the Baptist represents the best humanity has to offer but “the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” That is, as soon as we take even the smallest of baby steps in the way of forgiveness and not being scandalized by seriously scandalous people, we are better than the best humanity can offer. There’s nothing to be proud of here. Jesus healed the cripple when he forgave his sins. This same forgiveness heals us and gives us the strength to take these baby steps into the Kingdom of God.

John the Baptist: A transitional Figure

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220px-John_the_Baptist_Prokopiy_ChirinAlthough John burned with a conviction that God was going to do something new, he had only the models of past prophets to guide him in opening a way to the great new thing. He lived in the desert, wore a camel hair coat and ate wild locusts and honey in imitation of Elijah. Like the prophets of the past, he warned the brood of vipers of the wrath to come if people did not shape up and turn back to God. (Lk. 3: 7) Again like the prophets, he told soldiers not to oppress vulnerable people. Yet again like the prophets, he rebuked his ruler, Herod. And like so many of the prophets, he was put to death.

In John’s time, baptism was established as a custom for cleansing converts. John gave it a new twist by insisting that his fellow Jews needed to be converted as much as the Gentiles and so were in need of being baptized. This was a prophetic action to dramatize God’s word. Today we call it guerilla theater. The teaching dramatized in this novel way was traditional: the people should return to the Lord who will purify them of their sins.

John defined himself through the words of Isaiah by quoting Isaiah’s prophecy of a new pathway of the Lord. (Is. 40: 3) The pathway through the desert that Isaiah was prophesying was for the return of the exiles from Babylon to Jerusalem, a great new thing God was doing in Isaiah’s time. In quoting these words, John was announcing that God was going to do yet another new thing, something God had never done before.

For John, this new thing was focused on a person who was to come. John believed that Jesus was this person when he came to the river. But John was confused about him, and not for the last time, when Jesus insisted on being baptized although John thought Jesus was the one person who didn’t need it.

When he was in prison by order of King Herod, John had doubts about Jesus and he sent two followers to ask Jesus if he was the one he was expecting. It seems odd that the healing miracles John’s disciples had just reported should cause doubts, but a ministry of healing was beyond the scope of John’s own ministry. Typically, Jesus did not answer the question, but pointed to his healings and said “ blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Lk. 7: 23) Given the fiery rhetoric of John’s own preaching, the sentiments of the Sermon on the Mount may also have been confusing to John.

John knew that his prophetic ministry was fading. In such a situation, most people fight back and try to regain the upper hand. René Girard suggests in The Scapegoat that John denounced Herod’s marriage not so much on legal grounds but because of the rivalrous action of taking his brother’s wife. This realization would have made John all the more cautious about rivalry on his own part and caused him to take Jesus’ admonition to avoid offense to heart, as offense is the spark that flames rivalry. John managed to renounce rivalrous behavior to the extent of saying that Jesus would increase while John would decrease. But did John know what he was renouncing rivalry for? Did John ever get an inkling that the greatest new thing God was doing in Isaiah’s time was not returning the exiles to Jerusalem but raising up a person who accepted disgrace, torment and possibly death without retaliating in any way? On reflecting on Jesus’ insistence that he be baptized, did John finally realize that Jesus was taking on the sins of the people as did Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, which would make Jesus the “lamb of God?” Most Bible scholars think it unlikely that John arrived at these insights and they think the evangelists wrote them into the narrative to elucidate John’s place in relation to Jesus. Maybe. But John obviously thought long and hard about his own vocation in relation to Jesus and he was outspoken enough to cry out glimpses of insight he still did not understand.

In our time we may think we know what John was pointing to even when John didn’t, but we do well to ponder why, in her infinite wisdom, the Church gives us a liturgical year that begins with Advent where John the Baptist is prominent. Why have a season to look forward to what we know we are looking forward to? Maybe we are more in the dark about what it means for Jesus to be the Lamb of God than we think we are. Maybe we still don’t really know what great new thing God has done and what greater thing God will do. Maybe we have a lot more to look forward to than we know.

A Highway to Seeing the Glory of the Lord

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treespath1After her humiliating defeat by Babylon, Israel was broken. The movers and shakers who had kept the society going were taken to Babylon where they couldn’t move or shake any more. Then, fifty years later, the prophet known as Second Isaiah proclaimed comfort to Jerusalem: the exiles will return, travelling through the desert on “a highway for our God.” Jerusalem will be made whole once again! This return of the exiles is a new thing, at least as great a new thing as God’s delivery of the Jews out of Egypt. Not only that, but, like the earlier new thing, this deliverance is a re-creation of the world by the God who is now proclaimed to be the sole creator of the world out of nothing.

René Girard suggested that the levelling of mountains and valleys stood for the levelling of society that precipitates a sacrificial crisis. I have a counter Girardian suggestion: the levelling of the desert landscape is God’s removing of the obstacles that prevent us from seeing God. The obstacles here are the social tensions created through mimetic rivalry that tear a society apart. For Isaiah, this levelling is God’s work and removing obstacles is what God does. God does not create social crises; humans do that. Isaiah said that, with the highway smoothed out, “all flesh” will see the glory of the Lord.” Not only that, but if a Gentile king had made this return possible, how much greater would the outreach be from Jerusalem to all Gentiles once the Jewish nation was reunited?

But such was not to be. The Jewish nation broke again and this time it was the Jews who broke it, not the Babylonians. Denunciations of social injustice protested by the Isaianic prophets before the Exile were repeated by Isaiah’s successors after the exile. The movers and shakers who had returned from exile also returned to moving and shaking at the expense of their weaker Jews. An anonymous victim, known as the “Suffering Servant” paid the price for the nation’s brokenness. The mountains and valleys had been recreated and the glory of the Lord was hidden once again.

“The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ” is the opening of Mark’s Gospel. The Greek word “arche” also refers to the ultimate beginning of creation and the two attempted re-creations in Jewish history. Mark quotes the words of Isaiah to announce that once again (or still) God is creating a highway for God. So it is that the subsequent appearance of Jesus and his baptism by John is yet a new beginning for humanity. Once again God is removing the obstacles and just as quickly, humans are putting the obstacles back in place, with the result that Jesus was left hanging on a cross.

By coming round every year, the Season of Advent proclaims God’s removing of obstacles so that all of us, together, can see the Glory of the Lord. Will we join God, at least a little, in the work of removing obstacles so that we can glimpse the glory the obstacles hide?

The Need for New Hearts: an Advent Meditation

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wreckedTrees1The traditional apocalyptic Advent themes of Death/Judgment/Heaven/Hell fuse in the recent mass shootings, especially the one at Sandy Hook School in Connecticut. A traumatic event like this at this time of year gives us occasion to wonder about the end of the world.

In a memorable poem, Robert Frost mused over whether the world will end in fire or ice. His first thought is that from what he has “tasted of desire,” he holds with “those who favor fire.” The violence of shooting deaths and terrorist attacks is filled with gunfire, suggesting that we should favor fire. René Girard has warned us that with the breakdown of the scapegoating mechanism as a way to hold a violent society together, we run the risk of apocalyptic violence spinning out of control. (See Violence and the Kingdom of God and Human See, Human Want.)

But Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar questions how fiery this violence really is. The opening rebuke of the people: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” applies to all of the characters in the play. The ominous oracle of the beast without a heart provides the play’s central image. The heartless violence that drives the plot from civil war to assassination to civil war is all as cold as blocks and stones as well as senseless.

The violence of mass killings and terrorist attacks is frigid.  Frost says he thinks he knows enough of hate to know “that for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice.” The powerful understatement is all the more chilling.

There is another way the world could end in ice than cold, heartless violence. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, warns us that our modern economy creates victims through indifference. We literally do not know what we are doing. The final story in my book From Beyond to Here, “Buyer of Hearts,” explores an apocalyptic of ice and indifference. Danny Melton, a boy already bummed out because his father has left the family, suddenly begins to see ghosts floating around the school. He becomes all the more creeped out when he discovers that the people are still alive in the flesh, although “living and partly living,” in the words of T.S. Eliot, is more like Danny discovers that many of his classmates and teachers have sold their hearts for large sums of money. The selling and buying of heart gains more and more momentum as more and more people become hopelessly depressed over what is happening to their families and friends. My story, Dupuy’s warning, and Frost’s poem show us that God gives us humans the responsibility let God create new hearts within us to keep the world from ending “not with a bang, but a whimper.”

Prepare a Way for the Lord: an Advent Meditation

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field1John the Baptist calls out to us with Isaiah’s words: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”  Isaiah here was referring to the return of God’s people to their rightful home from which they had been uprooted by the Babylonians. Even today, we live in exile, not living our lives in God as we ought. The call to repentance (metanoia) in John’s baptism means, literally, to turn our minds. This does mean just filling or minds with new books; it means turning our whole embodied selves in a new direction to see and live in a different way.

Isaiah prophecies a leveling process where the valleys are filled in, the mountains are brought low, and the crooked ways are straightened. That is, the obstacles within ourselves and within our culture that prevent God from coming to us must be removed. The image of leveling seems to suggest a social upheaval where the mighty are brought low and the lowly are raised up so that all are on the same level. This would be to overlook the real obstacle to God: our tendency to compare ourselves with one another without reference to God, preoccupied with being better than others or fretting that others are better than us. This preoccupation and the resentments they foster maintain the isolating barriers of valleys and mountains and block the way to God.

The repentance that Isaiah calls for is the renunciation of our rivalrous entanglement with others and allow for God’s leveling process that holds everybody in the same regard without exalting some or lowering others. Unfortunately, while God is smoothing out the way for us, we prefer to maintain the barriers that we think protect us. Opening a highway for God makes us vulnerable, not only to God but to all of God’s people. Take out the valleys and mountains and anybody could come deeply into our lives! Isaiah gives us fair warning by declaring that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Like all analogies, the analogy of smoothing out the landscape has its liabilities. Flat ground makes for boring scenery. Valleys and mountains make for beautiful scenery. God doesn’t destroy the landscapes God has made. That means, if we turn our embodied minds, we see that God’s leveling process is to rejoice in the valleys and mountains and twists of the road without rivalry or resentment.