Every year on the 2nd Sunday of Advent we hear a gospel reading
(Mark this year, Luke, next, Matthew the year after)
that identifies John the Baptist with the words
A voice cries in the wilderness:
Prepare a way for the Lord
and John’s gospel also contains this identification.
John the Baptist seemed to be a determinedly anti-establishment figure
(look at: where he preaches, his life-style, his message,
and the trouble he got into with Herod).
He shouts out for repentance, for a change of heart.
The ‘way for the Lord’ he shouts about
is to be prepared in hearts and lives.
As I said,
every year, on this Sunday, we hear the Baptist’s message:
Liturgically, he is shouting at us,
telling us to prepare for the birth of the Saviour at Christmas,
by repentance, by a change of heart,
by recognising that we do need saving.
In identifying John the Baptist, the gospels all quote Isaiah,
However, we hear the relevant passage only in every third year;
(you can see it in on your Mass sheet.)
…and it says
A voice cries, ‘Prepare in the wilderness a way for the Lord
In Isaiah, the way for the Lord is to be made in the wilderness.
Unanimously, in the gospels, this has been creatively reinterpreted,
so that it is the ‘the voice’ that cries in the wilderness.
– in modern terms it is about where to put a comma –
I offer a reflection that tries to combine these two senses.
Spiritually, ‘the wilderness’ isn’t a place
but a metaphor the human condition,
for our poverty before God.
We all need guides, prophets, voices like John the Baptist,
who speak from their own experience,
and hence from their own wilderness,
where, in one way or another,
they have recognised God.
They speak to us, they guide us,
to help us make ready, to help us prepare,
our own personal wilderness for the Lord.
They may do this in person,
or we may know them through their writing.
One of those people for me died last month, at the age of 100.
Sister Rachel Gregory, a Carmelite nun.
She was born in Sheffield in 1923 and turned down a place at Oxford to enter a Carmelite monastery in Mansfield at 18.
She wrote under the pen name Ruth Burrows.
Externally, Carmel was her wilderness,
and internally there was a wilderness too,
a wilderness which it would be presumptuous of me to try to summarise.
From that wilderness her writing speaks to me, with great clarity.
Like John the Baptist, she can be an uncompromising voice:
her writing is sometimes very challenging,
but is founded on wonderful, and helpful, insight,
and, like John the Baptist, she pointed resolutely at Jesus.
Having tried, in preparing this,
I don’t think I can easily communicate
why her voice is important to me.
Instead, I will just say
I give thanks for her long life of faithfulness
and the gift of encountering her writing.
Well unless you already share my enthusiasm,
that rather leaves you hanging.
Maybe the best final word would be to invite you to reflect
on who has been ‘a voice’ for you,
and then give thanks for them.