3rd Sunday of Advent A

The John the Baptist we meet today in chapter eleven of Matthew’s Gospel is a very different man from the one we met last week in chapter three. Then he was at the peak of his powers as people from Jerusalem, Judaea and the whole Jordan district came to hear his preaching. Now he is a prisoner, and as he lies alone in his cell he is tormented by doubts. Has he got it all wrong? Has his whole ministry been a mistake? Was Jesus really the one the prophets had spoken of or had he, John, completely misread the situation? These were deeply disturbing questions for John, and yet they are questions we all have to face in one form or another as we journey through life.

They often confront us during the period pyschologists call ‘mid-life.’ It comes to different people at different times and in different circumstances, but essentially it is about doing what John did in his prison cell and coming to terms with the reality of our lives as opposed to the hopes we might have once had about them. When we are young we have plans and ambitions, dreams even, most of which don’t turn out as we had envisaged. There are failures and disappointment along the way and ‘mid-life’ is a time for coming to terms with these and learning to live with and accept things as they are as opposed to what we had hoped they would be. It’s vitally important that we do this because the way we live the rest of our lives depends on it. If we can successfully negotiate this critical moment in our lives then we have every chance of living the rest of them more or less happily and at peace. Bad things will happen, but we will deal with them. If, however, we fail to come to terms with reality, making peace with what has actually happened, the danger is that we will grow into bitter and resentful old people, impossible to please and never happy. I know such people and feel great sadness whenever I meet them.

But there are other ways, too, in which we face the kind of questions and doubts John faced in his prison. At a personal level I live with them all the time. I have explained to you before how sometimes when I am praying there before the Blessed Sacrament I find myself confronting the possibility that all I am doing is talking to myself. And if I am, if I am deluded about all this God stuff, then, like John the Baptist, what has my whole life been about? Somebody told me recently that my obvious faith in the resurrection when I speak at funerals encourages him and helps him believe. But there are moments now and again when the whole idea seems absurd to me. But I can live with that just as I can live with the fact that all those hopes I had as a young priest, ordained just after Vatican II, will not be fulfilled until long after I am dead. If Isaiah could do it with something that was eight centuries in the future then, with God’s help, so, hopefully, can I. Although I have my moments.

But for many in the Church it is all too difficult. Some have lost patience with the slowness of change since Vatican II and have walked away. Others, unable to accept or understand what is going on have, without realising it, also walked away. Clinging to the past and claiming loyalty to traditional Catholicism, they seek refuge in a Church which no longer exists except in their own minds. The first group are afraid the Church has got it all wrong, the second, trapped in their own little world think they know it has. And, as we contemplate John’s struggle in prison and try to see the parallels with our own experience, it’s important that we understand the nature of this struggle. One way or another it has been like this all through history and if we are to be men and women of faith at this time then we must face these questions the way John the Baptist did in his own life.

It was the same, of course, all through the Old Testament. We began Advent with the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz concerning Judah and Jerusalem. But as the centuries passed and nothing happened, many lost faith in what the prophets had said. Only those whom the Bible calls the ‘Anawim’, the poor of Yahweh, remained faithful, represented in the Christmas story by Simeon and Anna who were in the Temple day and night convinced that one day the words of the prophets would be fulfilled.

The very word Advent of course means waiting, a notion that lies at the very heart of what it is to be a man or woman of faith. But central to any waiting is an element of uncertainty. A woman standing at a bus-stop canot be sure the bus will come. A businessman waiting for his lunch-companion to arrive may wait in vain. And it’s the same with faith. The man or woman of faith in the world today has to be able to live with not-knowing and uncertainty. He or she has to be able to live with doubts and questions, accepting that often there are no answers, and avoiding the temptation to invent them. Whether people are liberal or conservative in the way they see things in the Church today is largely a matter of personality. The important thing is our willingness to go where God leads, letting go in the process of our own ways of thinking, and doing so because, without knowing what the future holds, we put our trust in him.

And that’s exactly what St James says in the second reading today. ‘Be patient brothers until the Lord’s coming. Think of the farmer: how patiently he waits for the precious fruit of the ground. You too have to be patient. Do not lose heart.’ words which speak directly to the time we are living through. And the words of Isaiah too are profoundly relevant: “Strengthen all weary hands, steady all trembling knees and say to all faint hearts, ‘courage, do not be afraid.’” The simple truth is that there is too much fear around today whether in the Church or in the wider world. There are many complex reasons for this, some of them not without foundation, but at their root is the fact that the world has stopped trusting in God and in his promises.

Well, next week, we will meet the one whose greatness lies precisley in the fact that she believed the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled, in her own person the very personification of Advent.


BIDDING PRAYERS


We have heard much in recent days about the United Nations Climate Change Talks in Bali, Indonesia. It is a subject around which there is much pessimism and where prophets of doom abound. But fear and pessimism will get the world nowhere. And so we pray for a deep sense of how God is at work in this crisis, calling humanity to conversion. And we pray, too, for much more confidence in the capacity of the human race to respond to this movement of God and turn the whole crisis into a new beginning for everyone on the planet…………………..Lord hear us

‘Come Lord and save us’ was the response to the psalm today. And so we pray that that cry will go up from more and more people in the world at this moment in our history: that we will all come to recognize that God has already saved us in Jesus and that all we have to do is listen to him and learn to live by his teaching. And we pray in particular that those of us who, by baptism, are called to proclaim this message to the world will have a deep faith in it ourselves…………………………...Lord hear us

God’s timescale is not the same as ours. For God, in fact, there is no time. Everything is present to God and we are the ones who, living within the restraints of time and space, experience what it is to wait. And so we pray for the maturity we need to live with the doubts, questions and uncertainties which are an integral part of all waiting. We pray, too, for the wisdom we need to see the folly of inventing artificial answers which we then become attached to and turn into absolute truths…………Lord hear us

In the second reading today St James uses the image of a farmer waiting for his crops to grow. But Jesus had already used this image in the Gospel, talking of how the kingdom of God is like a seed which grows even when the farmer is asleep. How it grows, Jesus says, the farmer does not know. And so we pray for the insight we need to recognize the signs of the kingdom growing all around us…………….Lord hear us

Speaking of John the Baptist today, Jesus says that he was no reed swaying in the breeze. He was, in other words, a mature man who knew what he was about and was not blown about public opinion or anxiety about what others thought of him. He was a genuine prophet, a man who heard the word of God deep within himself and proclaimed it in season and out of season, regardless of the consequences. And so we pray for the grace we need to be even a little bit like him………………..Lord hear us

What confirmed for John that Jesus was indeed the one the prophets had spoken of was the fact that the Good News was being proclaimed to the poor. This is what all the prophets had said would happen and it was what reassured John and gave him peace of mind in his prison. And so we pray that this parish will proclaim Good News to the poor this Christmas by the way we reach out to them, beginning with the Homeless Lunch this Sunday………………………………………….….Lord hear us