3rd Sunday Advent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2010

John the Baptist had looked forward to the imminent coming of another more powerful than he, who would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit – the power of God at work in the world. Indeed, the more powerful one would baptise the world with the Holy Spirit and with fire. John said of the one coming after him that he would cut down and throw on the fire every tree that does not produce good fruit – and, to change the metaphor, that he would burn the chaff in a fire that would never go out. The language and the imagery were commonplace at the time – what scholars refer to as apocalyptic imagery. Yet, perhaps they tend to express, even if graphically, a fairly general human trait: They deserved it! They got what they asked for! Fair enough! Good riddance! And, to misapply a comment of Jesus: “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword!”

When John had baptised Jesus, he had hoped that Jesus was that more powerful one, the one who would baptise the world with the power of God. But Jesus did not turn out to fit the job description. And John began to wonder, to worry: Are you the one who is to come or have we to wait for another?

Perhaps our question in our day might be: Is the way of Jesus the best that God can manage? Is it the only way to turn the world around? to make life worth living? to save the world? to save us from ourselves? Baptise the world with the Holy Spirit and with fire … What is your sense of God’s Holy Spirit? of God’s power abroad in the world? And what is this fire? Interestingly, Jesus said elsewhere of himself: I have come to cast fire on the earth.

Are you the one who is to come or have we to wait for another? Jesus’ response to John’s question is pretty central to our whole idea of God – of God at work: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor. Interestingly, Jesus never prefaced any of his healings with the question: Do they deserve it? Is it their own fault?

The point of Jesus’ healings was mainly symbolic – symbolic of the greater possibilities of the Kingdom of God – not to phase out the need for hospitals or for doctors or nurses or dentists or whatever. The healings revealed the creative power of God – and the creative power of God was simply the expression of the heart/the essence of God. Truly creative power is love – there is no other.

Jesus baptises, he saturates, the world with the Holy Spirit of God, with the creative power of God, with the creative love of God. The fire that Jesus casts on the earth, and that he deeply yearns to burst into flame, is the fire of love.

The world will experience salvation when the world allows itself to be saturated with love. That was Jesus’ answer to John the Baptist’s question. And his promise to us is clear: Happy are those who do not lose faith in me (and he might have added: who do not lose faith in my way of undeserved love.)

Every Eucharist gives us another opportunity to say a deliberate Yes to Jesus’ way of loving and to affirm our readiness to face the inevitable price of loving. We are slow learners; but we struggle on.