Second Sunday of Advent B

Last week, as Advent began, I invited you to reflect on the nature of sin and how an awareness of it is a vital part of our journey towards God. But the sin I spoke of was not the kind many of us learned about as children. Based on the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas that human beings are attracted, not by evil, but by apparent good, we saw sin as the result, not of badness, but of foolishness. Like Adam and Eve in that wonderful Genesis story, we are constantly conned into doing things which initially promise much but soon turn to dust in our hands. That’s why, in last week’s gospel, Jesus urged us to stay awake and be always on the alert. Only by doing so, by constantly sifting through the things we do and, more importantly, our often hidden reasons for doing them, can we begin to spot the sin before it ensnares us. St Ignatius Loyola, in his rules for discernment of spirits, gives us good advice on how to do this, and the piece I offer you today is this: always be on the lookout for things which start of good but then become less good. ‘Bad’ may lie further down the line, but the movement from good to less good is the beginning of a slippery slope and the sooner we get off it the better. Harking back to the Genesis story, Ignatius calls this movement the tail of the snake, the infallible sign that something’s not right, and anyone who is serious about the Christian life must be constantly looking out for it. The trouble is that its capacity to mutate and reappear in ever more subtle forms is endless, but in an attempt to explore how it works I invite you to look a bit more closely at today’s gospel.

In it, we are told that John the Baptist wore a garment of camel skin, not a piece of information that, at first sight, seems tremendously significant. But behind it lies a whole story about how people have related to the human body over the years. Obsessed at times by what they saw as the sins of the flesh, good people, eager to please God, practised extreme self-denial. They, too, dressed in rags and animal skins, refused, in some cases, to wash, and, thinking it was a virtuous thing to do, treated their bodies as their enemy. And at the time people admired them and thought they were holy. St Ignatius himself, after his initial conversion, did it for a while, until he saw it for what it was; something which had started good, a desire for holiness, but which had deteriorated into something less good and ultimately something deeply unhealthy.

Today, of course, we have a much greater sense of the dignity of the human body and the importance of looking after it. But even things like healthy eating, going to the gym, taking care of our appearance, dressing nicely – all, in themselves, good things – have, built into them, the same capacity to deteriorate into something less good, such as the kind of unhealthy cult of the body and good looks which leaves so many people today feeling bad about themselves. Fasting has always had a role in the Christian life. John did it, eating only locusts and wild honey, and we know Jesus did it too. But when doing without food gets mixed up with the cult of appearance, then mutates into obsesssive anxiety about body shape, and from there slips into the eating disorders so many people, especially girls, suffer from today, then its not just the tail of the snake we see. Its the whole darned snake. But it’s what John says about his relationship with Jesus which takes us to the heart of one of the most difficult dilemmas we face at this particular moment in history.

‘Someone is following me’ John says,’ who is more powerful than I am, and I am not fit to kneel down and undo the strap of his sandals.’ And in another part of the Gospel he says that he himself must decrease so that this other person, Jesus, can increase, an idea that does not sit all that comfortably with the age in which we live. It’s the age, after all, of self-fulfilment, the age of person-centred counselling and psychotherapy, a time when we are encouraged to be everything we are capable of being, a time, we are told, when an individual can do anything he or she wants to do if they just set their mind to it. And this is fundamentally good. The idea that every person is unique and has the right be who they really are is clearly consistent with the fact that God has created every human being in his own image and likeness. And following centuries where only a small elite were ever able to fulfil their true potential and the vast majority of people were excluded from doing so through economic factors or through discrimination on grounds of social class or gender, it is clearly right. These old attitudes, however, were often reinforced by a certain kind of spirituality which, based on a false understanding of what pride and humility mean, a reflection to some extent of how we have understood what John says about himself and Jesus, encouraged people to be content with their position in life, respect their betters and not get above themselves.

But now that this way of thinking has largely disappeared and people today have options and possibilities that our great grand-parents could never have dreamt of, a new challenge emerges. As something essentially good again deteriorates into something less good, we are faced with another question. And it is this: when does self-fulfilment become self-indulgence? When does attending to my own needs become ignoring the needs of others? What happens when following your dream means trampling over the dreams of other people? How do we know the difference between self-esteem and self-delusion?

The human capacity to spoil what is good and turn it into something less good knows no limits. That’s why Jesus told us last week to stay awake, constantly examining and sifting through our motives for everything we do to detect the first sign of sin in ourselves. And it’s why, in today’s Gospel, John the Baptist speaks about the constant need for repentance and conversion. No sooner have we dealt with one manifestation of sin in ourselves than another takes its place, often the converse of the one we have just dealt with. Its like the Pharisee and the Tax collector. As soon as you think you are the first you are the second, and if you think you are the second you are the first.

The old snake, you see, has lost none of its subtlety.

BIDDING PRAYERS

There is perhaps no greater example of the human capacity to turn something good into something less good than the Christian Church itself. Sent out to be the light of the world and the bearer of Good News to the nations, it has time and time again succumbed to the temptations of history and failed to be what it is called to be. It is a Church ‘semper reformanda’, a Church in constant need of renewal, and we pray for a profound openness to that renewal in our own day........................Lord hear us

Governments, too, constantly disappoint and fail to live up to our hopes and expectations, a tragic example of this at the moment being Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe came to power after a long violent struggle against white domination of his country, and its people, at that time, were filled with hope and optimism. But now, all these years later, the country is in a state of almost complete ruin. And so we pray for Zimbabwe and for the whole of Africa at this time......................Lord hear us

The human capacity to spoil what is good is in all of us. And so we pray today for the wisdom we need to recognize the things we personally have spoiled over the years; the chances we have missed, the messes we have created, the bad choices we have made and the people we have hurt as a result. We ask God to come behind us, following our every step, clearing up our mess, healing the damage we have done and, slowly but surely, teaching us wisdom...................Lord hear us

One area where the human capacity to spoil what is good is most obvious is in marriage. Time and time again, relationships which begin with protestations of eternal love and undying commitment end up in pain and disaster. And even when this does not happen, many couples end up settling for something which is less good than it could be. And so we ask God to stir in married people here today something of their original enthusiasm and commitment..........Lord hear us

The contemporary emphasis on self-fulfilment, a product of both modern psychology and a more human-friendly theology, is fundamentally good. It is a sign of God moving in history at this time and the basic response of the man or woman of faith must be one of profound gratitude. But self-fulfilment can become self-indulgence and there is plenty of that around in the modern world too. And so we pray for the insight and wisdom we need to know the difference.................................Lord hear us

In the first reading today, we hear the opening words of the second part of the book of Isaiah, written, not by Isaiah, but by the anonymous prophet of the Exile in Babylon. ‘Console my people, console them,’ he cries out, in a world where there were no obvious grounds for consolation. But his cry came from deep within himself, from the place where God lived in him, and we pray for the grace to speak words of consolation to people today from that same place in ourselves..................Lord hear us