3rd Sunday of Advent B

Since Advent began, we have been reflecting on the nature of sin, not to give ourselves a hard time, but to lay the foundations of a mature understanding of the mystery we are preparing to celebrate. Christmas is about the birth of a Saviour. But what does this mean? Why do we need a saviour, and what is it he saves us from? Questions which cannot be answered without a profound understanding of sin and its effect on us at every level of our existence.

And so we went back to what St Thomas Aquinas said about sin hundreds of years ago: that human beings are not attracted by evil, only by apparent good; our conclusion being that, at its root, sin is fundamentally the result, not of badness but of foolishness. Like Adam and Eve in the Genesis myth, we are forever conned into pursuing paths which promise much but turn to dust in our hands, causing harm to ourselves and to others. And because the temptation is so subtle and becomes more and more subtle as we grow in the spiritual life – the serpent, after all, was the most subtle of all the beasts on the face of the earth – we must be constantly examining and sifting through, not just what we do – that’s the easy bit – by why we do it. That’s where the real problem lies; at the level of what moves and motivates us, and it’s only possible to come to grips with sin in a mature and adult way if we are both willing and able to confront this not very attractive part of ourselves where things are not at all the way they appear on the surface. As Paul said in that second reading: ‘think before you do anything – hold on to what is good and avoid every form of evil.’ And we saw last week how, if we want to find the place in ourselves where sin lurks, one way is to look out for things which start of good and then become less good. This is always a sign of the serpent’s presence and, if we follow its trail, it will lead us into the place within us where sin lives.

But who would want to makes this journey? After all, it is like leaving behind a comfortable, well-heated room and descending into a freezing dimly lit old cellar filled with all kinds of creeply crawlies. This is the place where lie those unpleasant aspects of our personalities which we spend a lot of time hiding, not only from others, but from ourselves. And while there are a number of ways we do this – like never seeing any fault in ourselves and blaming other people for everything – the one I invite you to be aware of today is the way we are able to come here each week, hear the Word of God, and go away untouched by it. It reminds me of those invisible force-shields on the Starship Enterprise which could deflect away anything fired at it. There is no more challenging or subversive book anywhere than the bible and yet like Captain Kirks on our own little spaceships we have developed shields which deflect away what the Word says leaving us free to carry on as if nothing had happened. And we do this because we have swallowed the most subtle of all the serpent’s lies, which is that, to let God into the centre of our lives, to let Jesus be the Saviour we say he is, will mean doing dull, boring holy things we don’t enjoy. And it’s not true.

So why do we believe it? Well, because, at first sight, it appears to be true. Just as evil can initially appear attractive, and so deceive us into thinking it is something it isn’t, so the movement of God in our lives can seem quite daunting, even frightening or disturbing, at first. Mary herself, as we will hear next Sunday, was deeply disturbed by the angel’s greeting, and it will be the same for us, too, as, at some stage in our own spiritual journey, God leads us into the place where sin lies and invites us to confront it. But for those who have the courage to make that journey the most wonderful surprise awaits. This place which we would rather not visit, because, at the human level it is so often a place associated with failure, criticism and blame, becomes, instead, a place of profound consolation. It becomes the place where we meet God and experience, often for the first time, the sheer depth of his love and forgiveness. With God there is only one reason for going there. It’s not to blame or to criticise but to show us what, left to ourselves, we would become and why it is we need Jesus as our saviour. In this initially unexpected place we meet the God the prophet speaks of in the first reading, the God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken, proclaims liberty to captives and freedom to those in prison. And what I invite you to see today is that all of this is the work of the Trinity, Father Son and Holy Spirit, acting deep within the life of each one of us.

In the end, you see, Advent is not about the birth of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yes, we remember that, but the coming of Jesus the Church really looks forward to now is his Second Coming - whatever that means exactly. From the beginning of time the Father has longed to share his own life with us and in the Jesus of history he shows us the way to himself, how to live the kind of fully human lives which prepare us to enter the kingdom. But the real work from the time of the resurrection onwards is done by the Spirit living and working in us. Slowly but surely the Spirit works to bring about his profound revolution in us, drawing us, stage by stage, little by little, into the life of the Father. The New Testament describes this in different ways. Paul speaks of puting on Christ, of becoming other Christs, of Christ living in us. At Mass each week we ask the Father, through the Spirit, to make us more like his Son and Paul, in words we will hear paraphrased in the music at Communion, says, ‘I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.

The whole purpose of our existence is to die to sin and grow into the likeness of the Risen Christ. And if that is what you want, visit the place in yourself where sin lives and bring what you find there to the Penance Service a week on Tuesday. God will be waiting for you there.


BIDDING PRAYERS


We have said many times over the years that only those with mature, personal faith will survive in the Church of the 21st century. But part of this mature faith is an adult understanding of what sin is. This involves moving beyond sin as ‘telling lies’ ‘swearing’ ‘being disobedient’ and so on and grappling with the twisted and distorted parts of ourselves which lie at the root of all the suffering that goes on in the world. And so we pray for the grace to confront these in ourselves.................Lord hear us

The capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. We see it, even, in small children, when they smash other children’s toys or deliberately spoil their games. And so we pray again for the insight we need to recognize the good things we have spoiled over the years. Sometimes destructive, violent forces are stirred up in us which cause us to do or want to do bad things to other people, and we ask God for the grace to see these forces in ourselves for the deep rooted sin that they are................Lord hear us

The virtual disappearance of individual confession from the life of the Church in recent years is due, almost entirely, to our failure to develop a mature understanding of sin. Brought up on a diet of so-called sins which came to mean less and less as we grew up, many of us have stopped going to confession because we cannot think of anything meaningful to say. And so we pray that God will gradually lead us from this place to mature individual celebrations of this great sacrament................Lord hear us

The first reading this week speaks of a God who brings good news to the poor, binds up hearts that are broken and makes both integrity and praise spring up in the sight of the nations. And so we pray that, faced with the effects of human sinfulness in the world today, the Christian Church will be the bearer of good news rather than criticism and condemnation to the men and women of our time, so that the place of sin will again be the place of encounter with God’s love and mercy..........Lord hear us

The fight against our deep sinful tendencies is never-ending. That is why, in the second reading, St Paul tells us to think before we do anything, holding on to what is good and avoiding every form of evil. But he goes on to remind us that God has called us and will not fail us. And so we pray for a deep sense of God at work in history and a firm belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil in the fullness of the Kingdom which we call The Second Coming of Christ.....................Lord hear us

One of the things we do with small children is shelter them from the uglier side of life. The danger, however, is that we spend our whole lives hiding from it, one sign of this today being the proliferation of superficial, shallow reality TV programmes at the expense of more serious ones which explore important issues like poverty, hunger war, homelessness and so on. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to see what is happening to us and the courage and energy we need to resist it............Lord hear us