THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT REFLECTION

Thoughtful folks ask three questions:

a) What can I know? – the knowledge question.
b) What ought I to do? – the ethical question.
c) In what, in whom can I put my trust?

John the Baptist is front and center in our Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Advent. Those who heard John preaching were moved to ask – What are we to do? John is the bridge from the Old Testament of promise to the New Testament of fulfillment. His response to the question – What should we do? – represents a not unfamiliar response to all of us – that’s what the Ten Commandments are all about. But John points to the Advent of Christ. The Lord Jesus is now the way, the truth and the light. His way presumes the Ten Commandments and builds on them. This means for us Matthew’s Beatitudes, Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, Christ’s Law of Love, Christ’s Law of Forgiveness. In answer to the above question – What ought I to do? – the answer would seem to be – Do what the Lord asks of us in the New Testament.

Listen to how St. Paul summarizes the New Testament teaching: “Let love be sincere; hate what is evil; hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor. Do not grow slack in zeal. Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, bless those who persecute you and do not curse them, do not repay evil with evil; if your enemy is hungry, feed him, if your enemy is thirsty, give him drink, do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

On the Second Sunday of Advent, we focused our Advent attention on the mystery of the Incarnation, which means “becoming flesh”, “taking on our humanity”. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In other words, Christ Jesus, Son of God from all eternity, equal in divinity to the Father and Holy Spirit, took on our humanity and without ceasing to be his divine self, he became like us in all things except sin. Way back in the 11th Century, Anselm of Canterbury, bishop, theologian, man of God, wrote a treatise which he entitled: “Why Did God Become Man?” He did so to fulfill the Father’s plan for human salvation. He came among us to bear witness to the truth, he came among us to take away our sins, he came among us to show us the way to God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Intimately associated with Anselm’s question – Why did God become man? – is the somewhat foreboding question – Why the cross for Jesus, why the cross for those who follow Jesus, why the cross for those who do not follow Jesus? From our earliest days, have we not lived under the sign of the cross? At holy Baptism the celebrant called each one by name and said to us – “The Christian community welcomes you with great joy. In its name I claim you for Christ the Savior by the sign of the cross.” From our earliest days with the Catechism, we began to realize that the Lord Jesus was handed over to death according to the definitive plan of God the Father; that Jesus came to die for our sins so that we might become the righteousness of God. We cannot appreciate Christmas unless we look beyond Christmas to the mysteries of Holy Week. We cannot rejoice with the angels and shepherds unless we can first learn to hail the cross as Christ’s victory over sin and death, our vey source of hope.

The English author G. K. Chesterton once wrote – “According to many philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it by his commandments. That’s ridiculous, of course. God in making the world set it free. God has written not so much a poem, but a play, a drama, which he has planned as a perfect drama but, which necessarily, had to be left to human actors and stage managers who have since made a great mess of it.” Chesterton concludes – “We welcome our Savior at Christmastime because we know in faith that the Incarnation and the cross are God’s loving answers to the great mess we humans have made of things at the beginning and down the centuries.”

One writer has made an interesting suggestion. The author writes – “While doing theological studies over ten years ago, after having studied and taught philosophy for several years, I decided to sit down and read the Gospels as if they were really true.” “Of course”, he said, “I was a believing and faithful Catholic in the notional sense of faith. I thought I had better have more than a notional sense of the Gospels if I were going to preach about them. By the time I reached the end of Matthew, I was undergoing a life-forming experience.” What will we find if we follow this suggestion? We will find the revolutionary “Sermon on the Mount”, starting with the Beatitudes in Matthew’s 5th Chapter, which is so stunning, this author tells us, that most of us are tempted to act as though it couldn’t be true. Then there is the “Lord’s Prayer” in Chapter 6 telling us about God’s forgiveness of ourselves and reminding us that we are to be forgiving of others, seventy times seven. Matthew tells us to control our anger, not to lust after another, be careful about storing up treasures for ourselves, and we must not judge. Mindful of the words the disciples of John posed to Jesus – “Are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another?” – if all this from Matthew’s Gospel is true, if under the grace of the Holy Spirit we can give not just notional assent but real assent to what Matthew is telling us, then that is good, that gives us a good understanding of what Christmas demands. If we cannot give such assent, perhaps we ought to go elsewhere and begin to look for someone else.