3rd Sunday Advent A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2004

It sounds as though the setting of Isaiah’s vision was the situation of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, perhaps precisely around the time that the kingdom of their captors was about to crumble before the advancing armies of Persia. Hope breaks forth, hope for restoration, indeed for a triumphant return home to a soon-to-be-rebuilt Jerusalem. Isaiah’s message is a wonderful insight into the heart of God, a wonderful message of comfort and encouragement.

Yet, as I hear it, there is a discordant note. Isaiah still has more to learn about the heart of God. He is still caught in the bind that the God who is good to us must be devastating to our enemies: God is coming, vengeance is coming, the retribution of God; he is coming to save you. Saving you inevitably means punishing them. In fact, Isaiah will, with time, move beyond this, to a deeper insight into the heart of God, until he eventually sees the foreign nations, Israel’s enemies, recipients, too, of the goodness of God.

I wonder where John the Baptist was in his journey into the heart of God....Last week’s Gospel had John announcing: The Kingdom of God is close at hand.. – Allow yourselves to be radically changed and come on board: Repent. Yet John’s sense of God, the life-giving God, like Isaiah’s, still finds it hard to cope with the reality of human resistance: The axe is laid to the root of the trees so that any tree which fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown on the fire.  His sense of the one who will follow him, Jesus, is of one who will baptise you with fire... whose winnowing fan is in his hand .. and who will burn the chaff in a fire that will never go out.

It seems so natural to categorise people: the productive and the unproductive, the repentant and the chaff, us and them.  It seems so natural to categorise God likewise: rewarding us, rewarding the good, and destroying them, our enemies, burning up the chaff.

Imprisoned by Herod down by the Dead Sea, John faces his demons, He seems to experience a crisis of faith. He sends some disciples to Jesus: you’re not meeting the criteria, you’re not wielding the axe, burning up the chaff. Are you the one who is to come or do we wait for another?

And Jesus repeats to John his own self-definition (to Isaiah, too, for that matter), quoting the very words of Isaiah: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor. There is no violence in the stance of Jesus, simply Good News. The world struggles to see sense in this response of Jesus who refused to control, mitigate, lessen, and keep evil in check by even the least degree of violence - (that indeed does sometimes seems to result in establishing an apparent, even if tenuous, “law and order” for a time: though it’s struggling in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Palestine.)

He named evil, he unmasked it fearlessly, he actively resisted it, he shaped an alternative community, yet his response to violence was not to enlist a greater show of violence but to absorb the world’s violence in his own flesh, and reveal it for what it always and inescapably, is: violence.

It is a difficult path to follow, perhaps impossible without the empowering Spirit of God, but Blessed, indeed, as he said, are those who do not lose faith in me. I find it so hard, in my own defence of what I believe to be true, not to react violently towards those whom I disagree with. My temptation is not to physical violence, but gets expressed in dislike, ridicule, a dismissive attitude, behind the back criticism – effectively for my own purposes making those I dislike the enemy, non-persons.  It seems so instinctive: to meet rejection with rejection, criticism with criticism. In the process my own inner peace is undermined, the calls to grow and to mature are ignored, negativity is doubled, and the Kingdom project gets stalled.