This Sunday, We Each Have a John the Baptist in Our Heart

Our conscience speaks up to us in the Second Sunday of Advent, Year A, telling us to repent and be ready for the clear-cutting operation God is preparing to make way for a new kingdom.

Here are five takeaways for this Sunday drawn from Sunday Readings columns at this site and the Extraordinary Story podcast.

First: Jesus is “the Word;” John is “the voice.” Our job is to listen.

In the First Reading, we get a remarkable image of the Messiah from Isaiah. He calls him the chosen one who will “strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.” In the Gospel, we meet John who appears on the scene as “a voice of one crying in the desert.”

To avoid getting struck with the Word we need to listen to the message of the Voice.

John delivers his message in two ways: one way for the simple sinners; another for the holier-than-thou Pharisees and complacent Sadducees, who need to humble themselves first to be capable of accepting the Lord.

The Pharisees believed that they could behave in such a way that God would applaud and give them a reward in the hereafter. We are often like that. Theologians call it “Pelagianism,” but retreat masters might call it “Good Guy-ism;” the belief that if we are good citizens who pay our taxes, go to Mass, and play by the rules, God will reward us.

The Sadducees, on the other hand, believed that this life was all there was and that it was best to live for now. Many people today are like that, also; we believe that the hereafter is a benign state of divine warmth at best and a question mark at wors. If we are religious, that means we try to max out our pleasure while staying more or less on one side of an ethical line.

John the Baptist had a very specific message for the Good Guys and harmless pleasure-seekers of his time and ours.

“You brood of vipers!” John cries. “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones. Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees.”

Calling us a “brood of vipers” is a powerful spiritual image. When we let our pride go, we do two things simultaneously: We improve our outward appearance to others and create a safe space in our interior life for vices to grow. We become nests of serpents, holding our private sins close, nursing them with our superiority, bringing the swarm with us wherever we go.

But to the simple, John has a simple message, saying merely, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” That is the message for those who know they are sinners, who know they are broken, who know they need a savior; those who long for someone to pull them out of the snake pit they are trapped in.

We should listen to whichever message is appropriate for us.

Second, when John says “the ax is at the root of the tree” he reveals how radical his message is.

John the Baptist declares that “God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones, and adds “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees.”

He is not announcing a surgical pruning of trees; he is announcing the clear-cutting of a forest. He is telling the people of his time, and ours, that there will be a new dispensation founded in Christ. This is exactly what Isaiah says will happen in the First Reading.

“A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom,” he says.

From a desert of stumps, Christ will rise up, and from him a forest of plenty will grow, a new order in which “The wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain.”

This is the same Kingdom of heaven John is announcing.

Third, St. Paul tells us how we enter into this Kingdom.

Think of our Second Reading as Paul’s version of Isaiah’s prophesy of the “root of Jesse.” John the Baptist says “God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” Our families are those new children of Abraham, according to Paul.  Christ is coming “To confirm the promises of the patriarchs,” while gathering a new flock “so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.”

John the Baptist says “I am baptizing you with water, for repentance,” but Jesus “will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Isaiah spells out what the Lord’s Holy Spirit of fire will do. “The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him,” says Isaiah: “a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD.”

At Baptism we receive the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit that Isaiah identifies with the Messiah. These are the gifts that attune us to God (understanding); seeing as he does (wisdom), knowing him and doing his will (knowledge and counsel), facing the world with his strength (fortitude), and reverencing and delighting in him (fear of the Lord and piety).

In brief, the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit help us to hear and heed the voice of John the Baptist in our heart.

Third: John the Baptist is very much the voice of conscience. He even looks and sounds like a conscience would.

“John comes, doing nothing else but bringing them to a sense of their own sins,” St. John Chrysostom says. “This his very garb declared, being that of repentance and confession. This was indicated also by what he preached, for nothing else did he say, but bring forth fruits meet for repentance.”

We each need a John the Baptist in our lives — and we each have one. “Moral conscience, present in the heart of the person, enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil,” says the Catechism (No. 1777).

The kingdom of heaven is at hand in our lives when we follow our conscience, the John the Baptist in our heart.

The work of Advent is to sharpen our conscience and become more sensitive to it, in order to transform our conscience from a finger-wagger shaming us, to a finger-pointer, directing us to Jesus Christ. That is what the gifts of the Holy Spirit do. In fact …

Fourth: You can think of the spiritual process of Advent the way kids think of Christmas gifts.

The spiritual life is like the long wait we experienced as children, looking at the beautiful mystery of those Christmas presents and longing to see them opened.

We are in awe of the gifts under the tree as children. “Is this really for me? Do I really deserve it? ” we wonder, “And what is it?”

On the one hand, children live surrounded by signs of Christmas; on the other, Christmas remains far away. Children delight in the songs and decorations, but what they really want, the gift under the tree, is unavailable. They enjoy the anticipation they feel about opening it, but they long for the anticipation to be over.

Perhaps the high point of the tension between waiting and receiving is the very act of opening the presents. That’s when the “What could it be?” anticipation is at its highest, and the “Wow, look what I got!” surprise of seeing the gift is intermingled with it, all at once.

This is what we are preparing for in Advent as we prepare to receive a Kingdom from Our Lord; “the Kingdom of heaven” which is “at hand.”

Pope Benedict says that eternity is more like a moment that endures than like a series of events that drag on. The “opening the present” feeling of Christmas morning might just be a small foretaste of the greatness of heaven — where we will live constantly in that moment of revealing the mystery, and never move on to the moment where the surprise wears off.

But we have another moment like this at every Mass, if we let it: The moment when we receive Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. When we receive his body, blood, soul and divinity we, however briefly, enjoy that peaceable kingdom; a life of harmony on the mountaintop with our Lord, experiencing the summit and discovering the source of our life.

Ask Our Lord to expand his Kingdom in our lives, producing fruits of real repentance as we wait for his coming at Christmas and his final coming when the Kingdom of heaven will be all in all.

Image: wikimedia

By Tom Hoopes