Sometimes we miss how subversive the New Testament really is: the Jewish people expected a King to conquer nations, to level mountains and fill in the valleys, but when that King finally arrived (heralded by St John the Baptist) it was to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sins. The enemy to be conquered was death, and the hills and valleys to be smoothed were sin. As we look forward to the coming of Christ at the end of time, we must make smooth the way for him in our hearts - especially through the sacrament of Confession.
Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent (C)
The great beauty of this church building is that, when the homily is boring, you can just look at the wall and find something to occupy you there – a picture of the saints in the roundels above us, or one of the beatitudes written in Latin. Now, for five years as a seminarian I sat in the exact same spot in this Church, day after day for morning prayer, Mass, and evening prayer, looking up at the same spot on the wall, just over there to my left, and reading the beatitude written there in Latin.
Beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam, quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.
Translated:
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
I read that repeatedly over the course of those five years. I knew what it meant, and I pondered on it when the homily was less than interesting. But this year I started studying Latin again, for my course, and when I was sitting in this Church on Friday morning I noticed something was off about it. It’s that little word ipsorum that got under my skin. Because that word ipsorum, shouldn’t be there: it’s Genitive - it means of them – the Kingdom of heaven is of them. But if we wanted to indicate something being given as a reward, in Latin, we wouldn’t use that Genitive, that of them – we would use the Dative to say the Kingdom of heaven is given to or for them – ipsis est regnum caelorum. I had to ask my Latin teacher at the Gregorian that very same afternoon, to make sure my entire understanding of a piece of text I had understood so well and looked up at for five years wasn’t about to be flipped on its head. Familiarity doesn’t always mean understanding – we can read the same thing over and over again and still miss the point.
If we aren’t careful, if we read the Gospels with our 21st Century eyes, the same thing can happen and we can miss just how subversive these books we call the New Testament really are. We see it all throughout the Gospels.
Take the example of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. To us this is just about humility – humble Jesus, riding on the back of a humble animal. But a first century listener would know that on the very day and at the very time that Jesus was entering Jerusalem, on the other side of town Pontius Pilate was doing the same, on a horse, with great fanfare and triumph. They would have known Jesus was deliberately mocking Pilate’s entry into Jerusalem.
Again, cast your minds back two Sundays ago to the feast of Christ the King. On that Sunday, the Gospels gave us a dialogue between Jesus and Pilate – Pilate asks if Jesus is a King, and after a little back and forth Jesus answers him: mine is not a kingdom of this world. Jesus is not claiming kingship just over the Jews, but over something more, something bigger, something mysterious and out of the reach of armies and soldiers and emperors.
Take even the word Gospel – in Greek Evangelion or ‘Good News.’ Read it with a 21st century brain and we just think ‘Good News’ – oh sounds nice, of course it’s good news because it’s about Jesus. But even this is divorced from the context. Calling writings Evangelion – Good News – was an ape of the Roman state: because when the emperors sent out a proclamation it would be called ‘Evangelion’ – Good News. So when Mark, and Luke, and Matthew, and John call their accounts of Jesus Evangelion they are making a deliberately subversive point.
It’s this frame of mind we have to keep, when we read the beginning of today’s Gospel reading, Luke chapter 3. How does St Luke begin?
When Tiberias was emperor, and Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea. During the reigns of the tetrarchs Herod, Philip, and Lysanius, and the High Priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. (Paraphrase)
He begins with great men, with emperors, kings, and high priests. Then he shifts. Like the record scratch moment from an 80s film, where the music stops abruptly, everything pauses and the narrator shifts to somewhere completely different. During the reigns of all these great men in their palaces, St Luke tells us
The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.
God doesn’t deal with Kings and with great men, and He doesn’t come to the High Priests in the temple, but to the eccentric son of a minor priest, out in the wilderness, on the other side of the Jordan from Jerusalem.
What does John start preaching? Is he preaching rebellion and revolt? Is he preaching a Kingdom of this earth? Is he promising the riches of plunder and power? No. He went into the wilderness the Gospel says proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
In these first few weeks of Advent, we are meant to look forward to the coming Kingdom of Christ; the prophet Baruch and the words of our psalm proclaim the exaltation of Jerusalem after the sorrow of exile and we get the sense of that palpable expectation of a King who was coming from God to bring the exiles home, to level the mountains and fill in the valleys.
Yet here is St John, preaching Baptism on the other side of the Jordan, and we realise: our exile is not from Jerusalem but from God, the only mountains to be levelled are called pride, and selfishness, and greed, and envy, and the valleys to be filled in are called lust, and despair, and sloth, and wrath. It’s the path in our hearts that needs to be made straight for the Lord.
Once again, the Gospels turn expectations on their heads: this is not a Kingdom of this world, but a Kingdom of the heart and soul, a Kingdom calling us out of the world to something more, something bigger, something better than the world can offer us. This is one of those messages we hear in the Gospels repeatedly and we still don’t get it – that the Kingdom of God is about conversion, not conquest.
So many of us still fail to grasp this. So many of us want to worry about what’s going on out there. We want to talk about what our governments are or aren’t doing, what the Pope or the Bishops are or aren’t doing, what our parish or parish priest is or isn’t doing, what our Rector and formation staff are or aren’t doing. Very rarely do we want to stop, to look inwards, and to ask: what am I doing? What should I be doing? What am I not doing? Where am I going wrong?
The subversive message of today’s Gospel is that we need to stop worrying about the world out there, and start working on the world in here. In our hearts. In our minds. How does the Confession at the start of Mass say it? My thoughts and my words, what I have done, what I have failed to do. Saint Paul urges the same thing in the second reading,
let your love abound, be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruits of righteousness.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that this Advent it’s time to stop worrying about the world and start worrying about getting to confession. If you do nothing else in these weeks of Advent, do this. Take some time to examine those mountains and valleys in your heart then ask the Lord to make them smooth in the sacrament of Confession, to make the path to Him straight again.
If you do this, then (to borrow from Saint Paul) He who began the good work in you will (most certainly) bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
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