Like the one proclaimed on Thursday of the First Week of Advent [Mt 7:21,24-27], today’s Gospel Reading from the twenty-first chapter of Matthew focuses upon good works. Both of these passages contrast mere words with resolute works. Yet there’s a further similarity that’s even more important.
In the passage from Matthew 7, Jesus insists that for one to enter Heaven, one must do the will of God the Father. In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus proclaims a parable at whose center is a father with two sons. The human father in this parable is a symbol of God the Father.
This focus of God the Father can help you see that it’s not your own human will that’s key in your life. The key is the will of God the Father. This is the same Father who within salvation history loved His erring children—those resembling the first son in today’s parable—enough to send His only divine Son to die for them. The Father “willed” that His Only-Begotten, the one who in all things does His Father’s will—even on Calvary—sacrificed His life for the sinful son, who is you and me.
He guides the humble to justice, / he teaches the humble his way.
Today is the feast day of St. John of the Cross. He died on this date in 1591. It’s common for the church to celebrate the feast of a saint on the date of his or her date of death, inasmuch as the Church considers that date the saint’s “birthday into Heaven” (in Latin, the “dies natalis”). Still, in the midst of Advent we could hardly have a more fitting modern saint to show us what it means to wait for the coming of the Lord with patience.
In the midst of turmoil throughout the Church in the sixteenth century caused by unfaithful Catholics and by unfaithful reformers, St. John of the Cross worked with St. Teresa of Avila to reform the Church from within. In Spain these two saints would have had little contact with Protestants opposed to Church unity. However, they unfortunately faced a great deal of direct opposition from unfaithful Catholics who were opposed to the reformation of the Church from within. St. John and St. Teresa were members of the Carmelite order, and the reform that God brought to the universal Church grew in no small part from their reform of the Carmelite order. Unsurprisingly, their reform efforts were met with by great opposition. St. John of the Cross, for example, was unlawfully imprisoned by his fellow Carmelites for nine months in a cell only six feet by ten feet in size. This imprisonment ended only because of his escape.
Reform always encounters opposition. Authentic reform within the Church, such as the reforms led by St. John of the Cross, meets with opposition from those content with laxity. False reform within the Church meets with opposition from those concerned with the Church’s authentic unity. Authentic reform within the life of a member of the Church (such as yourself during Advent) meets with opposition from within oneself, where one encounters the stubbornness of one’s own vices and desire for comfort. Check out from a library, download from the Internet, or purchase one of the writings of St. John of the Cross, and allow this great Doctor of the Church to teach you during Advent of the Dark Night through which we can see the Light of Christ.
Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women on earth .…
Today’s Responsorial is not taken from one of the psalms, but from the Old Testament Book of Judith. The verses of the Responsorial, by which the Church praises Mary today, in their original setting praise the Old Testament heroine Judith. In the thirteenth chapter of Judith you can read of Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes, thus freeing her people from foreign control. The praise that follows, which we hear in today’s Responsorial, is offered by Uzziah, the king of Judah.
Although the transposition of this praise to honor Mary makes sense when one reads the verses themselves, the original setting might give one pause. However, even the setting in which Judith receives praise offers insight into the vocation of Our Blessed Mother, especially as we honor her today under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
In the first book of the Bible, after the fall of Adam and Eve, God curses the serpent and declares: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.” The Church has always heard these words as foreshadowing the advent of Christ and His mother Mary. It is through Mary’s vocation as the Mother of God that the power of evil is destroyed. As we ask the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe on behalf of the unborn and their mothers, we trust that her maternal love will transform our country and world into a culture of life.
There are many points that one might conclude from Jesus’ enigmatic statement that “wisdom is vindicated by her works.” Consider one point about wisdom, and another about wisdom’s works.
Wisdom can be considered from the perspective of God’s own nature, or in terms of what God freely chooses to do in salvation history. In the Catholic tradition, this consideration would be referred to in terms of the “immanent Trinity” and the “economic Trinity”.
What Jesus declares in today’s Gospel Reading ought to be considered in terms of God’s work of salvation history: creation, redemption, and sanctification. This is especially so in terms of wisdom being “vindicated”. The masterpiece of Saint Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, explores the vagaries of salvation history, which often seems to hold more troughs than peaks; more sin than grace; and more sinners than saints.
When it comes to salvation history, God certainly plays a “long game”. This ought to comfort those of us who waste so many years of our lives following our own interests rather than God’s. Saint Augustine explored this sad dynamic in his own life in another of his masterpieces, The Confessions. Fortunately for each of us, God loves us more than we love ourselves, and in Jesus is willing to make our sins His own so that His wisdom might prevail over our folly.
The Conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo by Fra Angelico
John the Baptizer is front and center in our Gospel today. We might ask, “How is John the Baptizer an Advent figure?” We don’t have little figurines of St. John the Baptist that we put in our crèche scenes: he was a six-month old baby, of course, when Jesus was born. In today’s Gospel passage, St. John the Baptist is a grown man, who’s not speaking about getting ready for the birth of Jesus. So how is he an Advent figure? What does his message tell us about our spiritual preparation for Christmas?
If we had to sum up John the Baptizer in one word, that word would be… “witness”. Our translation of today’s Gospel passage uses a slightly different range of words: “testimony” and “testify”. But what do you call a person who testifies, or gives testimony: is “testifier” a word? I think the word “witness” sums up what we’re thinking about when we look at John the Baptizer, because you can use it in three different ways, to describe: (1) who he is; (2) what he does; and (3) what he gives.
To give witness authentically, two things have to be true. You have to know what you’re talking about, and you have to talk truthfully.
On the one hand, the witness that you’re going to give, you have to know to be true. Sometimes we think of the verb “witness” as something passive, as if you were watching TV. But to be a good witness in a court of law, you have to have actively witnessed the events in question: you have to have seen what happened, in what order, and how.
Of course, even if you do know the truth about what happened, you have to be willing to testify, and to do so truthfully. Imagine, for example, that you were standing on a street corner, and saw an accident between two vehicles. You saw very clearly that it was the fault of the first vehicle.
But then the drivers get out of their vehicles, and you notice that the driver of the first vehicle is your grandmother. Suddenly, the police pull up. Do you go up to the scene of the accident, knowing that the police will ask for your name and a statement? Or do you turn away from the scene, so that you won’t be called into court to give witness? What motivates us to give witness, or not to give witness?
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John the Baptizer was not called to give witness about an event. And neither are we. John the Baptizer was called to give witness about a person: the person of Jesus Christ. For John the Baptizer to give authentic witness about Jesus, two things had to be the case: (1) he had to know what he was talking about, and (2) he had to talk truthfully.
In terms of John the Baptizer knowing what he was talking about, we have to recognize that there’s a big difference between knowing facts, and knowing a person. There’s a big difference between knowing—say—algebra, and knowing another person. There’s also an important difference between knowing facts about a person—such as their date of birth, or height, or favorite color—and knowing the person personally. To know a person personally, means to have a relationship with that person.
The same is true of each of us, if we are to be a disciple—a follower—of Jesus. It is not enough to know about Jesus. The devil himself knows far more about Jesus than you or I are ever likely to know (the devil, like all angels, is a creature of great intelligence). To know Jesus personally, as His disciple, means to recognize Him for who He says He is: the Way, the Truth, and the Life; the Lord and meaning of our world. … I guarantee you that the devil will never call Him those things.
To know Jesus personally means to know Him as our Lord. But that’s not enough to give witness to Jesus. Remember again John the Baptizer.
For John the Baptizer to give authentic witness about Jesus, the second thing that had to be the case was that John had to talk truthfully. We might think that this is easy: after all, I’m sure no one here has ever lied about the meaning of Jesus. I’m sure that none of you ever said to someone at a party, “Jesus is not important to me.” You’ve never told someone at the grocery store that “Jesus is just a person of historical importance, like Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr.” I doubt that any of you has ever tried to convince someone on your block that Jesus was just an inspiring guru, like Moses or Buddha, Confucius or Mohammed. You’ve never said any of those things.
Unfortunately, none of those statements is the real problem today when it comes to talking truthfully about the meaning of Jesus. Because the need “to talk truthfully” has two opposites. That is, there are two ways not “to talk truthfully”. The first is “to talk falsely”.
The second is “not to talk”, period. And unfortunately, this is the way that most of us fail to give true witness to Jesus. Whenever we pray the Confiteor at the beginning of Mass, what do we say to God? “I have sinned through my own fault… in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.”
But the last time that you were in the confessional, did you say anything about your call from God to give witness to Jesus? When was the last time that you said to someone at a party, “Jesus means more to me than any other person in my life”? When was the last time that you told someone at the grocery store that the teachings of Jesus offer the greatest possible happiness to every human person? When was the last time that you asked someone on your block if they believed in Jesus? Is it wrong to do so?
It is certainly culturally wrong. The culture that surrounds us vilifies and ridicules those who bring their relationship with Jesus to bear on other relationships in their lives. The culture that surrounds us reduces the meaning of loving Jesus to an interior, subjective feeling, rather than being a communal, objective truth.
In fact, Jesus wasn’t born into this world in order to be “one way among many”, or “one person’s opinion”, or an “alternative lifestyle”.
Jesus was born into this world to be, for every human being, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. God calls us, as He called John the Baptizer, to give others joyful, truthful witness about the difference that Jesus makes in human life.
St. John the Baptist by Alvise Vivarini (c. 1442- c. 1503)
“And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come.”
St. John the Baptist is a major figure of the early weeks of Advent. On several of the weekdays in the week leading up to Christmas Day, the Church proclaims passages in which we hear of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The Church, through these passages from St. Luke’s Gospel account, wants us to compare the nativities of John and Jesus in order to understand the connection between the two.
Today’s Gospel Reading is set during the public ministry of Jesus, who declares that John the Baptist “is Elijah, the one who is to come”. How are we to understand this declaration? The last book of the Old Testament can help us. In Malachi 3:23 the Lord of Hosts proclaims: “Now I am sending to you / Elijah the prophet, / Before the day of the Lord comes, / the great and terrible day”.
During Advent we might well identify “the day of the Lord” with the Nativity of Jesus. But we ought to remember that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in order to die at Calvary. The day of Jesus’ death on Calvary is more properly “the day of the Lord”, for on that Good Friday the Lord Jesus took upon His shoulders the sins of all mankind. That day of Good Friday is “the great and terrible day” of which the Lord speaks in Malachi, and for which St. John the Baptist means to prepare us.
Today’s First Reading from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah proclaims the unique majesty of the Lord God. This proclamation highlights the radical distinction between the Creator God and each of His creatures. In Isaiah we hear God ask a rhetorical question. “To whom can you liken me as an equal? says the Holy One.”
This question evokes the rhetorical question posed by one of God’s greatest creatures: Saint Michael the Archangel. The name “Michael” is literally a question: “Who is like God?” It’s not a coincidence that St. Michael is the angel who thrusts down into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits [see Revelation 12:7-9]. After all, Satan and the other fallen angels were thrown down from Heaven for believing that they were like God in His majesty and power.
By contrast, God the Son, who is equal to God—indeed, who is God—in every way, did not deem equality with God something to be clung to [see Philippians 2:6]. The humility of Jesus’ Incarnation at the Annunciation is complemented by the humility of the surroundings at Bethlehem. Yet these forms of humility are but preparations for the humility of Calvary, where the Creator God dies in order to offer His creatures the chance of eternal life.
In the beginning, God had a plan. God’s plan was for mankind to live a blissful life in this world, and at the end of that earthly life, to rise body and soul into Heaven.
But mankind did not cooperate. You know how Adam and Eve brought sin into the world. They did not cooperate with God’s plan, and so God came up with a “Plan B”. In this “Plan B”, God would show His love for mankind by sending His only Son to earth, knowing that man would crucify this Son, yet also knowing that the Crucifixion of His Son would destroy the power of sin and death.
In God’s “Plan A”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan. They failed. Adam and Eve instead brought sin and death into human experience. Adam and Eve changed a human paradise into a valley of tears, full of suffering, doubt, and at time, even despair.
In God’s “Plan B”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan. These two obeyed. They fulfilled God the Father’s Will. And so through there two—Jesus and Mary—you now have the opportunity to live a life here below filled with hope and joy. Those virtues and all the rest of the virtues will be fulfilled in the perfection of Heaven if we cooperate with God’s grace to the hour of our death.
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Today the Church throughout the world celebrates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Blessed Mother is the one creature in all of God’s Creation who obeyed God unfailingly. Our Blessed Lady is the one human person who has been completely open to accepting Jesus into her life. God knew that Mary would be such a woman before her life began. That’s why He gave her a gift at the moment that her mother, St. Anne, conceived her. God kept Mary from inheriting Original Sin, so that Mary would be the best possible mother for His Son.
We hear of Mary’s faithfulness in today’s Gospel passage. “Gabriel was sent from God… to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph… and the virgin’s name was Mary.” She asks how she, a virgin, can conceive. But God’s messenger assures Mary that God’s Son will be conceived in her womb by the Power of the Holy Spirit.
Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus reflects God’s omnipotence. God can create something out of nothing. In the beginning, God created the universe out of nothing. Similarly, in the nothingness of Mary’s virginity, God creates, and His Son is conceived as a human being in Mary’s womb. But these two acts of God creating out of nothing—God’s creation of the universe, in the beginning; and God’s creation of Jesus’ human body and soul, in the fullness of time—both foreshadow an even greater miracle on God’s part.
Likely you have heard the saying, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the Cross.” This saying isn’t literally—historically—true, but its truth lies in pointing out that Jesus’ conception and birth were a means to a greater end: that end being Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. As another saying puts it, “Jesus was born into this world, so that he might die from this world.”
Through Mary, God’s Son comes into the world to destroy sin and death. Jesus’ vocation is fulfilled more than three decades later, according to the same pattern by which God created in the beginning, and in Mary’s womb. God creates… out of nothing. So it is with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus. Human sin is a failure to love. Human sin is an absence of grace, an absence of love.
You and I, as human beings: how do we respond when someone doesn’t love us? In our sinfulness, we usually respond in kind. If someone gives us the cold shoulder, we do the same. We respond to an absence of love with a further absence of love. That’s how sin works: it spreads like a spiritual and moral cancer, destroying the love that God meant, in the beginning, for our human life to be all about.
Thanks be to God, God does not respond to sin as you and I do. If God did, then when we wandered far from Him, God would have (metaphorically) turned His back on mankind, and left us to wallow in sin, finally to die and exist forever separated from Him. Thanks be to God, God responds to the nothingness of sin by choosing to love. Down into the midst of a human race of sinners, God chose to send His only-begotten Son. On Calvary, in the midst of the nothingness of rejection, rebuke, scourging and mockery, Jesus offered His life for the forgiveness of sin. In the midst of the nothingness of sin, God “re-deemed” the world.
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Thanks be to God for His act of “re-creation”. Thanks be to Our Blessed Mother Mary for saying “Yes” to her part in God’s plan. And thanks be to God for preparing Mary to say “Yes” to His will for her life. Those are the three truths that the Church celebrates today on this Holy Day of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
First, God from all eternity, knowing that man would reject Him, planned to re-create the human world through the offering of His Son. Second, God chose Mary to be the Mother of His only-begotten Son, and Mary chose perfectly to accept this vocation. Third, knowing from all eternity of Mary’s fidelity, God prepared Mary for her vocation be means of a unique grace: the grace that we call the “Immaculate Conception”, preserving her at the moment of her conception from Original Sin.
This gift was given to Mary not only for her own sake, but for the sake of her Son, and for the sake of all those who would become members of her Son’s Mystical Body, the Church. You and I celebrate Mary’s fidelity today because she is our Mother. We honor her as the first and best disciple of Jesus Christ. We also honor her because of the unique gift of holiness that God gave her through her Immaculate Conception. During this Season of Advent, Mary’s life shows us best how to receive Jesus into our lives.
The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom.
In today’s First Reading from the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, “the desert” is a focus. This focus is apt for the first two weeks of Advent, when St. John the Baptist is so often at the forefront of the scripture passages we hear. The desert, after all, is where John the Baptist dwells. In the desert he carries out his ministry of preaching and baptizing, both of these for the sake of repentance.
Yet in spite of the desert’s connection with solitude and penance, and as fruitful as points can be for our Advent meditation, today’s First Reading describes the desert for a different purpose. Isaiah describes the desert for the sake of illustrating, in a phrase, the “reversal of fortune” that the Lord’s merciful love will effect when He comes.
The desert is a place where little to nothing grows. Yet when the Lord come, “the parched land will exult”, “will bloom with abundant flowers, and rejoice with joyful song.” This is not the only reversal of fortune that Isaiah foretells in this passage. Through the Lord’s power “the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared”, and “the lame leap like a stag”. The Lord brings life to what seems dead, as the birth of Jesus offers hope for new life to fallen man.
Reflections on the Sacred Liturgy 