The Second Sunday of Advent [A]
Isaiah 11:1-10  +  Romans 15:4-9  +  Matthew 3:1-12
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
December 7, 2025

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah, who lived seven centuries before Jesus, prophesied about a day that was to come.  Isaiah preached about that future day on which the Messiah—the Savior of the Jews—would appear and set things right in the world.  But Isaiah’s prophecy is a little strange.

Isaiah begins his prophecy with the words:  “On that day ….”  That day, Isaiah foretells, will be a day of unexpected sights and sounds.  The images that Isaiah describes seem to be contradictions:  the lion eating hay, and the wolf as the guest of the lamb.  But then comes the most disturbing image, especially if we think of the manger in Bethlehem:

“The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.”  We would never expect to see this image in real life.  In fact, if you are a parent, it’s the last image you’d want to see. 

The Lord probably gave Isaiah the image of the baby because of a baby’s innocence and weakness, and how it contrasts with the serpent’s cunning and danger.  But whether Isaiah knew it or not, his image also sums up the meaning of Christmas.  God the Son, who existed from all eternity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, entered this world of ours as a tiny baby.  And what kind of a world is it?

The world we live in—the world God the Son entered as a baby—is a world of sin and sickness.  The Gospel accounts make clear that the world into which Jesus is born is a world where justice is denied to the innocent, and kings are liars.  This world of ours is turned upside-down, and this is the world into which God the Father sent Jesus as an innocent baby.

Why would God the Father do that?  God the Father, who is perfect, and without any needs, chose to send His Son from Heaven to earth:  from Heaven—a place of perfection, the Kingdom where His Will is done—to earth—a place where sin has the upper hand, and a lair of the serpent where everyone gives in to his temptations.

The baby Isaiah prophesies about is the baby Jesus, and the snake is the Devil.  Isaiah’s prophecy echoes what God had warned the serpent in the Garden about after Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin.  God said to the serpent:  “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” [Genesis 3:15].

No matter how poorly you and I offer our lives to God, day in and day out, He still loves us.  God’s love is mysterious and unexpected, and is the same love that we are preparing to celebrate at Christmas.  This is the love which God the Father incarnates when He sends His only Son into this world of sin, to take that sin upon Himself on the Cross.

These truths can be hard for us to fully accept.  We may say we believe these truths of our Faith, but the Church knows how hard it is for us truly to accept not only how much the Father loves us, but also to accept this truth’s consequences.  That’s why we fallen human beings need an entire season of four weeks to prepare for Christmas.

Last week I mentioned three practices that are a good way to prepare during Advent.  We can remember them with the initials P-S-P.  These three letters—P-S-P—stand for the practices of poverty, silence, and penance.  These three practices can help us to accept more readily the gift God wants to give us, and to accept also the consequences of this gift.  That’s especially true of the practice of silence.

Silence is hard to come by these days.  A lot of people who live in the country appreciate silence.  However, with the nature of mass media today, it doesn’t matter if you live at the top of a mountain:  radio signals, TV signals, wireless Internet and more can be beamed to you, or maybe we should say at you.  To create an atmosphere of silence, you have to go on the offense.  You have to unplug, disconnect and turn off a lot of devices.

Of course, there’s also another difficulty when it comes to silence.  Sometimes we don’t like silence.  Noise has a way of blocking out, or distracting us from, our own thoughts and concerns, which at times we’d rather not face.

But maybe we need to accept silence as a gift.  In fact, in our spiritual life silence is a two-fold gift.  The first aspect of the gift of silence is that it’s a gift we give ourselves, so as to hear one’s own true self, even when that’s uncomfortable.  But the importance of silence also goes beyond our selves.

You remember the Old Testament story about Elijah, to whom the Lord God spoke, not through fire or an earthquake, but through a tiny whisper.  In the Christian spiritual life, silence is not an end in itself.  Silence is a means, or rather, a medium through which to hear the Word of God.  This is takes us to one of the most important truths of our Catholic Faith.  This truth will be proclaimed on Christmas morning in the Gospel Reading from John 1.  You might want to look it up and make it part of your Advent spiritual reading.

The Word of God is not a book.  The Word of God is a Person:  the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity.  In John 1, St. John proclaims that this divine Word, which was in the beginning, became Flesh and dwelt among us.  He became flesh and blood—one of us—in order to offer that Body and Blood, with His soul and divinity, on the Cross at Calvary.  His Sacrifice on the Cross is made present to us sacramentally in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

This is a message we sinners need to hear, and we need silence to be able to hear it, to appreciate it, and to start making changes in our lives in order to accept this gift more fully.