The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.
It’s obvious that today’s date—December 17th—begins the final week of Advent. One week from today the Church will stand at the threshold of Christmastide. What’s not so obvious is that the Church approaches this final week of Advent differently than the season’s first few weeks. Beginning on December 17th, the Gospel Readings at weekday Mass shift from scenes set during Jesus’ adulthood to scenes set before His birth.
Today’s Gospel Reading is the first seventeen verses of St. Matthew’s Gospel account. The very first verse tells us what this passage is all about: “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” This genealogy of Jesus is different than the one recorded by St. Luke the Evangelist in Luke 3:23-38. St. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ genealogy goes back in history only to Abraham, while St. Luke’s traces Jesus’ lineage back to Adam himself.
Nonetheless, the figures of David and Abraham help us understand the structure of the genealogy that St. Matthew records. Today consider just the latter of these two persons. The genealogy has three parts. Abraham and Jesus stand at either end, revealing the most important truth of this genealogical record: that Jesus fulfills what Abraham, “our father in faith”, could only foreshadow. The shadows of the Old Testament are now giving way to the light of Him who soon will be born.
“In the Lord shall be the vindication and the glory of all the descendants of Israel.”
Confusion sometimes arises from the question that John the Baptist in today’s Gospel Reading instructs his disciples to ask Jesus. People wonder: “Doesn’t this question—‘Areyou the one who is to come, or should we look for another?’—suggest that John the Baptist wasn’t really familiar with his cousin Jesus, and was even uncertain about the role of Jesus in the Lord God’s plan for Israel?” The answer, of course, is “No.” But why then does John instruct his disciples to ask this question?
By way of answering, we might point out that John isn’t sending his disciples for his own sake, but for theirs. John wants each of them to encounter Jesus and hear Jesus’ answer to the question as a sort of initiation into a relationship with Jesus.
However, one might in response ask a further question. “Why, then, did Jesus answer the disciples’ question by saying, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard ….’?” The fact is that these disciples need for the time being to remain under the instruction of John the Baptist.
Jesus does not say to these disciples what He said to Peter and Andrew: “Come, follow me.” These disciples, like us during Advent, need to sit at the feet of John the Baptist and allow his message to sink more deeply into our hearts before we can be true disciples of the Lord Jesus.
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?
+ + +
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.
Reflections on the Sacred Liturgy 