We are oftentimes surrounded by alerts. In these days of smartphones and constant connection to the virtual world, we receive numerous alerts from our devices. The long rings for a phone call, the short beeps for texts and emails, and whatever sundry beeps, boops, and twirls we make these things do to make us aware of something whether it has any importance or not. We don’t want to be left in the dark about anything, hence the many alerts.
Perhaps we already filter these alerts between what is necessary versus the trivial. But what would happen if we ignored those alerts? If we didn’t respond to the rings and beeps and buzzes coming from all these devices? We would be ignorant of what was happening in the world, unaware of anything beyond what someone tells us in person. While this might be better for us overall, it would be very difficult to communicate important or tragic news if we ignored our alerts. While annoying, they do serve their role of notification.
John the Baptist stands out in our Gospel today as the ultimate alert, one that cannot be ignored without repercussion. As we move closer to Christmas, the Church presents us this striking figure of the preacher in the desert, a man foretold by Isaiah to be the one charged with preparing the way for the Lord. His message is summed up in the first words we hear from him today: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! Yet how are we to respond to this alert?
The answer lies in that very first word, “Repent.” Saint Matthew and the other gospel writers us the word metanoia in Greek. We freely translate it as repent, but how well do we understand what either word means? The Greek word metanoia signifies a complete conversion, a total change of life from what was previously done. To undergo metanoia was to make a radical change in one’s life, even to the point of doing the opposite of what you had done before.
John the Baptist stands as the trumpeter or herald announcing the arrival of the king. He prepares the way for the Lord by giving us the first hints of what the newborn King will proclaim in His public ministry in a few years. The trumpet blast is meant to grab our attention, and John does this so as to call us to do the same thing Jesus will demand later on: for all of us to undergo conversion, metanoia, from our sins. Why is this so necessary that John makes this announcement ahead of Jesus?
This trumpet blast is necessary because sin is the reason why Jesus comes into the world. God had revealed numerous times before the birth of Christ what must be done to live rightly, to live in holiness: abandon sin, abandon the false gods, enter into the covenant with God and observe all that He asks of you. Yet so many times we failed to do that. This is because sin still remained upon us, saturating our souls such that it was impossible on our own to do all that God willed. Therefore, sin needed to be removed from humanity so that humanity could once more be able to enter into the holiness desired for all by God.
Many people are going around proclaiming that Jesus is the reason for the season, and they are not far off. Yet the deeper reason why Jesus comes in this season is the problem of sin. Sin separates us from God, deforms our natural and supernatural capacities for good, and inclines us away from God and closer to the devil. Ever since the garden, sin has sliced humanity off from total union with God, with no apparent end in sight, until a lowly virgin was told that she would be the mother of the Savior. It is because of sin that Jesus comes into this world, so that He could remove it from us and restore us to God.
Yet the story is not that short. Too often, we think of the great Christian story as this: God creates man, man sins, God sends Jesus, Jesus removes sin, the end. There is so much missing from this oversimplification. Jesus does come to free us from sin: the wood of the crib foretells the wood of the Cross. But the redeeming sacrifice of the Cross is powerless unless we accept it and we begin to sin no more. God does not grant us a free pass to sin by the death of His Son; God demonstrates to us in the Cross the depths of His love and His desire for us to love in return. And that is the whole reason behind John the Baptist’s trumpet call today.
Jesus Christ, speaking in Himself and through His forerunner John the Baptist, wants us not merely to avoid sin but to become holy, to be saints. He wants for us metanoia, a complete conversion away from sin, from death, and from the devil towards Himself, towards the good, towards eternal life. There is no middle path in the teaching of Jesus: either you are moving forward towards God or moving away from Him and towards the devil and damnation. There are no sidelines, no pits, no timeouts in the game of Christian life: we play to win or we play to lose.
Christianity is not meant to be comfortable: it is the truest challenge to the whole world. Our faith first dares to proclaim that there is such a thing as sin, that there are quite a few things that are not willed by God and are dangerous for us, even perhaps some things that are quite popular in the world today. But it doesn’t end there: our faith calls every human being to abandon those things, to abandon sin, and to receive the mercy and love of God won for us in Christ Jesus. Saint Paul in our second reading sees this as the means whereby the promise of the patriarchs is confirmed, the first inklings of what would happen first on Christmas Day and then on Good Friday.
We wear violet during Advent because it is a penitential season. We do not sing the Gloria because we are waiting for the glory of God to appear once more in the crib in Bethlehem. We mark this season with penitence because our sins are the reason for the season, the purpose for Christ to be born into the world. Only by facing the truth of our sinfulness, of our complete incapacity for winning our redemption by our own efforts can we then truly rejoice in a few weeks when we see that tiny child in the manger. Only when we admit our sinfulness can we then rejoice at the sight of our Savior who will help us to be converted and to live.
Let us then weep over our sins, which have lead not only to the birth of our Savior but will lead to His death as well. Let us repent of our sins, undergoing the conversion, the metanoia, that John the Baptist proclaimed as will the One who follows after him. Let us receive the mercy of God through the sacrament of confession so that we may indeed glorify God for His mercy to us and to all generations. Let us not despair that we are sinners, but let us hope once more in the saving action of Christ brought to us through the sacred liturgy, turning to the Cross as our only consolation and our only hope. Let us not ignore the alert of John the Baptist this day, but let us indeed repent of our sins and of our sinful way of life, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment