3rd Sunday Advent B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

The official delegations from the capital asked John the Baptist two very basic questions: Who are you? Why are you baptising?

Their first one: Who are you?  What is your sense of yourself, of your identity, of the deepest meaning of yourself as a person?  John’s answer was clear: A voice that cries in the wilderness: Make a straight way for the Lord!  He was a voice crying out from the wilderness of life, from the midst of people caught up in illusion and distraction, adrift from their roots, their purpose, their meaning, submerged in what he would later identify as the sin of the world.  He saw himself as a voice crying out on behalf of God.  It was the voice of one in relationship with God, one whose sense of self whose sense of meaning arose from that deep bond with God.  He saw himself as a man trusted by God, entrusted by God with a mission: Make a straight way for the Lord.

And that mission gave the answer to their second question: Why are you baptising?  Why do you do what you are doing?  John saw his role, the meaning of his life, as preparing and inviting people to encounter God; and in encountering God, to find themselves and their meaning, and to break free from the illusory world that is sin.

Next week’s Gospel will present Mary to us.  We could well ask her the same two questions: Who are you? Why do you do what you are doing? 

To the first question: Who are you? What is your radical sense of yourself? Mary’s answer would be: I am the handmaid of the Lord.  As was the case with John, so too her sense of who she was was rooted inextricably in her union with God.

And if we were then to ask her: Why do you do what you are doing? What is the meaning of your life? What is your mission in life? she would answer: to shape the human face of the mystery we call God.

Perhaps Advent is a good time as we ask ourselves the same two questions: Who am I? Why do I do what I am doing?

When I ask myself: Who am I? I hope that my answer would truthfully be: I am one loved and trusted by God.

When I ask myself: Why do I do what I do? I again hope I could truly answer: I am one who wants to help others to see him more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly.

Both questions are in fact hard to answer, and depend very much on accurate self-knowledge.  And the pursuit of that is proving to be a life-long task.  But I believe it is a worthwhile task, not just for myself but for all of us.  It is the only way to evaluate and to prioritise the myriad lesser things that fill our lives.  It is the only way ultimately to break free from the power of the sin of the world.

And now we move into Eucharist.  Who are we? I hope that Eucharist serves to remind all of us that we are persons in the deepest possible relationship with the God to whom we freely offer our lives in union with Jesus.  Why do we do this? We do this because we want to, because we believe that our lives have meaning, because we want to associate our selves and all our activity with the saving work of Christ, because we seek to be nourished to become more like him, more suffused with his own spirit, by eating his very body broken for the world and drinking his blood poured out to liberate us and our world from the suffocating power of sin.