Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

What an exuberant and fitting ending for today’s Liturgy of the Word. Blind eyes are opened, the lame leap-like stags, tongues of the mute sing, and sins are forgiven. One is left breathless by the end. Sister Julia Upton writes that in taking the long view, each of us can say that we have experienced “incredible things” in our lives, no matter how young or old we are. Too often, though, we remain shortsighted, unable to see beyond the challenges of the day or the moment, limping and stumbling. The longer view can restore our spirits and nourish hope. That is Isaiah’s intent today. His cascade of beautiful, life-giving images was addressed to a community that had been in exile for decades, sapping both strength and spirit. Who could not be lifted up by these colorful, joyful, melodic images? The Pharisees and teachers of the law, at least initially, seem doubtful about the wonders before them; Jesus reads their hearts and challenges them to see beyond. And so too with us in these Advent days. Jesus reads our hearts and longs to restore our spirits and nourish hope. In an Advent homily, St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached about the three comings of Christ. Hidden between God’s coming to us in the Incarnation and the Second Coming at the end of time, Christ comes into each of our lives today if we remain open to the possibility. After all, Jesus has the long view and knows the road ahead. Onward! Incredible things lie ahead.

Writer Alice Camille says that there’s something about a free person that is just so attractive! Take the woman who is confident enough to let her greying hair remain grey. Or the teenager who isn’t enslaved to the cool factor. Or the neighbor who gives up keeping up with the Joneses and doesn’t buy into The Next Big Thing. Or someone who refuses to play partisan games but prefers to hold onto values wherever they are found rather than the pigeonhole of political identity. If we’re looking for a role model of human liberation, John the Baptist is the guy. Emerging from the wilderness, he’s a man who is not owned by any authority or ideological camp. Roman soldiers come for his advice because they know he’s not in anyone’s pocket. The Pharisees seek his baptism as openly as public sinners and the average Judean citizen. John entered the wilderness to shake society’s grip and escape its preconceptions, cravings, and conveniences. He also eluded the rubberstamp of religious institutions that pose a stranglehold on prophetic impulses, especially those that challenge their notions of good order and authorized power. Because neither temple nor government nor social convention lays claim to him, John is free to speak whatever the Spirit of holiness puts into his mouth. And he would lose his head as the price of such freedom. The real test of his liberty is that even that real possibility did not deter him from saying and doing what was given to him to proclaim. This brings us to the question: have we been bought, by whom, and to what extent? I know there are ways that I am more American than I am Christian, more middle class than I am Catholic, more a product of my education and its advantages than I am a disciple of the gospel. Every advantage I’ve accepted without question is one step down the road of compromise with a culture that does not always or often invest itself in gospel values. John went into the wilderness to escape the shackles of conformity and compromise. Routinely, you and I must also seek the wilderness territory to shake ourselves free of counterfeit allegiances and remind ourselves to whom we ultimately belong.

Researchers have conducted studies demonstrating how people’s actions are affected by how they view themselves. If you are convinced you are bad at math, you will do worse on a math test than if you felt you were progressing. You’re much less likely to win if you expect to lose a chess game. Given this dynamic, it’s worth considering whether we view our role in God’s kingdom the same way God does. Today’s Gospel reading from Matthew begins with a familiar scene: Jesus is preaching, healing, and giving himself to everyone who comes to him. But then he pauses; the overwhelming need of the crowds strikes him. And notice this: Jesus doesn’t just redouble his efforts or pray to the Father for his intervention. No, he turns to the disciples and urges them to pray for more workers. Then he sends them out to do works of ministry without him. From that day onward, it became clear that Jesus didn’t intend to do everything himself. He has reserved much of his kingdom’s work for his followers, and that includes us. Jesus wants “laborers for his harvest,” everyday people willing to do the kingdom’s work. Kingdom work has many different roles requiring many different skills, but God most needs willing servants. When we step up and offer ourselves, he makes us fruitful. We must find the right balance between our diligence, God’s faithfulness, and our work and his grace. Or as St. Augustine is said to have remarked, “We need to work as if it all depends on us but pray as if it all depends on God.” That can sound challenging, but Jesus reminds us that we have freely received God’s goodness and grace, and that’s what we should be working hard to give away.

Today, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Bishop Robert Barron writes that the Church Fathers consistently referred to Mary as the new Eve, which is to say, the one who reversed the momentum started by the mother of the human race. The Ave of the angel was seen as the reversal of Eva. While Eve grasped at divinity, Mary said, “May it be done to me.” Here’s the liberating paradox: passivity before objective values is precisely what makes life wonderful. Allowing oneself to be invaded and rearranged by objective value is what makes life worth living. And this applies unsurpassably to our relationship with God. The message that your life is not about you does indeed crush the false self that would bend the whole world to its purposes, but it sets free the true self. The Immaculate Conception itself is concealed in the privacy of salvation history, but the effects of it are on clear display in this Gospel. In the presence of the supreme value, we ought to say, along with Mary, “May it be done to me according to your word!”

Who are you when you cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come.” The opening verse from Matthew’s gospel should hopefully affirm our daily effort to put Christ’s teaching into practice, especially in times of personal difficulties or in times like today with the upheavals we are witnessing in the Church. How do we stay firm in the faith in these challenging times? Fr. Richard Rohr looks at how we embrace the kingdom of God. “I suspect what Jesus means by “Lord, Lord” is how we try to make the kingdom of God into our own ideal of that kingdom. If we make heaven into the kingdom, we miss most of its transformative message. We are not waiting for the coming of the ideal church or any perfect world here and now . . . the kingdom is more than all of these. It is always here and not here. It is always now and not yet . . . The kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of self and society or personal reward.” Bishop Robert Barron asks what our foundation is built upon. “On what precisely is the whole of your life built? Your heart or soul is the center of you, the place where you are most authentically and deeply yourself. That is your point of contact with God. There, you will find the energy that undergirds and informs all the other areas of your life: physical, psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual. As such, it is the most important and most elusive dimension of who you are.”

These words from the first reading of Isaiah bring us into the language of the feast. This is a celebration that the Lord has prepared for his people. This is also a prefigurement of the eucharistic banquet that Jesus instituted. His meal is divine nourishment as he provides his own Body and Blood to strengthen our soul. Saint John Paul II said, “To share in the Lord’s Supper is to anticipate the heavenly feast of the marriage of the Lamb. Celebrating this memorial of Christ, risen and ascended into heaven, the Christian community waits in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” It is our pledge of future glory. So, how do each of us approach the Eucharistic celebration at Mass? Is this just a memorial meal or a glorious encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ? How you embrace this says everything about how you view the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic celebration.

Today’s first reading from Isaiah speaks about a shoot sprouting from the stump of Jesse, new buds blossoming from dead wood. The stump is another way of speaking about the house of David, which had been cut down by the Babylonians, who forced the people of Israel to live as migrants and exiles in a foreign land. Isaiah gives testimony to the radical nature of biblical faith: to dare to believe in God’s power to regenerate life, even and especially in places where the world sees only death. The Second Coming of Christ that history is waiting for is not the same as the baby Jesus or even the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was one man, and Christ is not his last name. The Christ includes the whole sweep of creation and history joined with him and you, too. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that we very rightly believe in “Jesus Christ,” and both words are essential. The celebration of Christmas is not a sentimental waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born! We do the Gospel no favor when we make Jesus, the Eternal Christ, into a perpetual baby, a baby able to ask little or no adult response from us. God wants friends, partners, and images if we are to believe the biblical texts. He wants adult religion and a mature, free response from us. God loves us as adult partners, with mutual give and take, and you eventually become the God that you love. I understand where such devotions to the Infant child Jesus come from, but these do not come close to the power of the biblical proclamation that invites us into adult cooperation, free participation, and the love of free and mature persons in God. The Christ we are asking for and waiting for includes your own full birth and the further birth of history and creation. Now you can say, “Come, Christ Jesus,” with a whole new understanding and a deliberate passion!

The American Declaration of Independence says we have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. God created us to be happy and joyful in this world and the next, and Jesus echoes the same thought several times in the Gospel of John. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that the only difference between the two is that any happiness that is demanded from life never becomes happiness because it is too narcissistically and self-consciously pursued. The “joy that the world cannot give” always comes as a gift to those who wait for it, expect it, and make room for it inside themselves. The first construct of happiness revolves around self-assertion and the second around self-surrender. The first is taking; the second is receiving. Those are two entirely different human dynamics. You do not catch a butterfly by chasing it: you sit still, and it alights on your shoulder. Then it chooses you. That is true happiness. When we set out to seek our private happiness, we often create an idol that is sure to topple. Any attempts to protect any complete and private happiness amid so much public suffering must be based on an illusion about the nature of our world. We can only do that if we block ourselves from a certain degree of reality and refuse solidarity with “the other side” of everything, even the other side of ourselves. Both sides of life are good and necessary teachers; failure and mistakes teach us much more than our successes. Failure and success were often called “the two hands of God.” It takes struggle with both our darkness and our light to form us into full children of God, but of course, we especially resist “the left hand of God,” which is usually some form of suffering or loss of control. As in our Gospel reading today, it was the same suffering of the centurion’s servant that brought the centurion out of his comfortable house and that invited Jesus into that house! Suffering and solidarity with the suffering of others have an immense capacity to “make room” inside of us. It is probably our primary spiritual teacher.

People are forever predicting the end of the world. In Christian circles, this is generally connected with speculation around the promise Jesus made at his ascension, namely, that he would be coming back, and soon, to bring history to its culmination and establish God’s eternal kingdom. Fr. Rolheiser writes that there have been speculations about the world’s end ever since. The early Christians took Jesus’ advice and believed it was useless and counterproductive to speculate about the end of the world and what signs would accompany it. Instead, they believed, the lesson was to live in vigilance, on high alert, ready, so that the end, whenever it would come, would not catch them asleep, unprepared, carousing, and drunk. However, as the years moved on and Jesus did not return, their understanding began to evolve so that by the time John’s Gospel was written, probably about seventy years after Jesus’ death, they had started to understand things differently: They now understood Jesus’ promise that some of his contemporaries would not taste death until they had seen the kingdom of God as being fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus was, in fact, already back, and the world had not ended. And so they began to believe that the world’s end was not necessarily imminent. Now, that invitation to stay awake and live in vigilance was related more to not knowing the hour of one’s own death. More deeply, the invitation to live in vigilance began to be understood as code for God’s invitation to enter into the fullness of life right now and not be lulled asleep by the pressures of ordinary life, wherein we are consumed with eating and drinking, buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage. All of these ordinary things, while good in themselves, can lull us to sleep by keeping us from being truly attentive and grateful within our own lives. The end of the world shouldn’t concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is in what state our dying will find us.

On the Saturday weekend in which we celebrate the start of the Advent season, Jesus is always telling us to wake up, to stay awake, to be vigilant, to be more alert to a deeper reality. What’s meant by that? How are we asleep to depth? How are we to wake up and stay awake? Fr. Rolheiser asks, “How are we asleep?” All of us know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us: our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives. How do we wake up? An awareness of our mortality does wake us up, as does a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer, but that heightened awareness is easier to sustain for a short season of our lives than it is for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. Nobody can sustain that kind of awareness all the time. None of us can live seventy or eighty years as if each day was his or her last day. Or can we? Spiritual wisdom offers a nuanced answer here: We can and we can’t!  On the one hand, the distractions, cares, and pressures of everyday life will invariably have their way with us and we will, in effect, fall asleep to what’s deeper and more important inside of life. It’s for this reason we need to begin each day with prayer. None of us live each day of our lives as if it were our last day. Our heartaches, headaches, distractions, and busyness invariably lull us to sleep. That’s forgivable; it’s what it means to be human. So we should ensure that we have regular spiritual rituals, and spiritual alarm clocks, to jolt us back awake – so that it doesn’t take a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or death to wake us up.