2008
Theme: We are called to be witnesses to Jesus as was John the Baptist
On this third Sunday of Advent the Gospel turns our attention to John the Baptist, a prophet sent by God to prepare the way for Jesus. John declared openly: “I am not the Messiah”.......... and “Among you stands One Whom you do not know, the One who is coming after Me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of His sandal”. John bore witness to the Light; his task was to point out Jesus for the people, as the One they needed to encounter and to know personally. “He is the Lamb of God,” John declared, “Who would take away the sins of the world.”. Jesus’ life on this earth was a life lived in total service to others. Jesus was a Servant-Leader, He was the Shepherd-King spoken of by the prophet Isaiah. Jesus’ first disciples, and His apostles, had great difficulty understanding and grasping His role as a servant. Jesus told them that He had come: “not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.” They certainly were impressed, even astonished by His many miracles. They were wildly excited when Jesus fed more than five-thousand people in the wilderness with just five barley loaves and two fish, and they wanted to make Him their King then and there. However, Jesus had other plans. He was not to be the kind of King they had in mind, and they failed to understand that. When He entered the holy city, Jerusalem on Palm Sunday riding on the back of a donkey, the people hailed Him as their King, and they spread palm branches at His feet, but He had come to Jerusalem to be handed over to the authorities, to suffer and to die on the Cross, and they failed to understand that. In the Upper Room as He celebrated the Last Supper with His closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus wrapped a towel around His waist and washed their dusty, smelly feet, as would an ordinary servant, and they failed to understand this as well..
In the Gospel of John we read that Jesus was the Word of God who was born into this world, Who assumed human nature, became flesh, but, as John reports: “the world did not know Him..... His own people did not accept Him. But to all who did accept Him He gave power to become children of God.” (Jn. 1:11-12) We became the sons and daughters of God by our Christian baptism and as such we have therefore a great responsibility to live as Jesus lived, to live our lives in imitation of Him Who is our servant-King. Do we really understand that? Are we trying to do that? Do we understand that as His disciples today, we are to follow Him, we are to be like Him Who wants us to be servants of others, servants of those who are in need?. Do we understand that we are called to be instruments of His love and compassion for others? Do we understand that to follow in Jesus’ footsteps must be our first priority in life? Is it obvious to others that we are Christians by our love for them? On this third Sunday in Advent let us examine the way we are living our lives, let us look at how well we are doing as disciples of Jesus, our servant-King.
A professor at a large university once decided to ask his students to turn in a self-addressed, stamped post-card along with their final examination papers. After reading the papers the professor would then put the grade given to each student on the post-card and mail it back to them.. While correcting the papers he came across one card on which one of his students had written the biblical phrase: “Blessed are the merciful.” After reading the student’s work the professor wrote on the post -card he sent back: “Final grade - F - Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”. Painful though it may be, it is very important for us to acknowledge when we have failed, or when we are failing to do what God expects of us in our lives. It is a valuable exercise to periodically examine our conscience, which means simply to carefully look at our relationship with Jesus to see how well we are or are not following His teachings and His example. The Church gives us the wonderful sacrament of Reconciliation precisely to help us be reconciled to God and to one another, to have our sins and failures forgiven, to make a new start, to re-charge our spiritual batteries, so to speak, so we can be better persons and better witnesses for Jesus in the world today.
In today’s second reading the apostle Paul reminds us that we must “hold fast to what is good..... and abstain from every form of evil”. If we have failed in any way to follow Jesus, then we need to repent of our sin. We need not be discouraged because of some setback, nor should we give up trying to improve our lives because it is hard work. Instead, we need to remember that Jesus is with us, that He loves us even after we sin, and that He invites us to go to Him, seek His pardon, and His help that we may do better in the future.
It was Mark Twain’s birthday one year, and a friend wanted to send him best wishes. So the friend wrote a little note, but then he realized that he had no idea where or in what corner of the world Mark Twain might be at that time, so he simply addressed the note to “Mark Twain - - God knows where.” After a long time passed, one day the friend finally received a note back from Mark Twain. It was post-marked Italy and it had only two words on it which said: “He did.”
The truth is that God knows all about us. God knows where each one of us is at any given time on our spiritual journeys. There is nothing hidden from God. He knows our likes and dislikes, He knows our virtues and our sins, and despite all that He loves us even more than we love ourselves. He knows when we are trying to do His Will, and He also knows when we are not really trying to improve our lives. We cannot fool God. Like the student who got an “F” grade on his final exam, there is no way to “beat the system”. If we want a passing grade in the course “Learning to Live the Christian life” then we have to work at it; there is no other way. As John the Baptist said, we must turn our attention to Jesus and follow Him, as servants who seek to help others. Life with Jesus is about helping the poor, it’s about comforting the sick and the elderly, it’s about being with the lonely, and seeking justice for the oppressed. It is about promoting and defending life, it is about getting along with others, whether at home, or at work or at school, or wherever we are. It is about forgiving those who have hurt us, and asking the forgiveness of those we have hurt. It is about trusting in Jesus to help us daily as we try to follow Him.
We heard in today’s Gospel: “There was a man sent by God. whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the Light, so that all might believe through Him.” Today, Jesus asks each of us to be “the salt of the earth...”. and “the light of the world.” We are that salt and that light for others whenever we proclaim the Good News of God’s great love for them and show them that love by the way we treat them. May the Lord Jesus bless you and your loved ones all through this season of Advent.