Homily from the Parish Priest for the Second Sunday of Advent
Readings for Year B: Isaiah 40:1-11; II Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8
I don’t know about you but I’m really enjoying seeing more people out and about, places of hospitality open, and especially being able to do this again, celebrate Mass together in public. A number of people have certainly said this is the case for them too and have also said something else which I find interesting. That, compared to the first lockdown in March, April and May, this short one for the month of November has been especially difficult. And I wonder if that is also to do with the time of year – the short days and longer and longer nights, the darkness and the stillness. Around central London these last few weeks have just been so silent, as though a permanent night had enveloped the city.
And it’s prompted me to think of the place of silence, of stillness in my life. And how this speaks to me about this season of Advent, this year with a very different flavour. Normally our life at Farm Street would be super-busy at this time of the year with carol services and parties and lots of activities in the frantic run-up to Christmas. This year we can’t do all that, sadly – we’ll be back to it next year – and the mood is different. After what we’ve been, what we are going through, the silence and the stillness is surely inviting us to take time to reflect more deeply on where God is in the midst of these strange times.
It’s especially when we’re here that we give ourselves the chance to listen to God. To allow God to speak to us about his plan for our lives. And here we walk alongside the People of Israel being beckoned on by John the Baptist who urges us to prepare, to prepare well, for the next chapter of our lives. In a sense it seems to me that this year the mood is more naturally one of how Advent could be if I took it more seriously, a time to slow down, to wait, to prepare well. A time to do what the Holy Father is constantly calling us to, to an active reflection, an active discernment, an active taking stock of where I am in my life and collectively where we are as God’s family.
Discernment is one of those churchy words which of course have special resonance for Jesuits and those who follow the spirituality of St Ignatius. Pope Francis uses it a lot. I think we can sometimes misconstrue discernment. We can think it’s something unnecessarily passive, always taking time to reflect back on our life rather than responding right now with action. Or think that it’s something somehow only for the professional religious people, a mysterious skill we need to learn. And we really don’t need to think in these terms. Discernment is for everyone and is simply responding to God’s call to be a good disciple. It’s about looking back – that’s true – and about looking at my present, about my life right here and now – and asking God for light to show me where he’s been and where he is right now.
Even in the midst of this terrible time our faith is based on the confidence that good will always triumph and we will learn from our experiences. Not just look for a silver lining but see God in all things. And from that we prepare a straighter path to welcome him into our lives and our world again. Pope Francis invites us in spending time looking for God’s gifts not to stay there, not to naval gaze and be passive, but through our looking for what this time might be teaching us to rebuild, to take the reins and reset our priorities. To prepare a straight path for him to enter into our world and renew us.
Now back to this second Sunday of Advent and to the Gospel. John comes onto the scene at this moment. He calls us to come to life again, to awake from our slumber, as in Israel he beckoned the way to a God who is so much larger and unfathomable than our expectations, who prepares the way for a community of faith which is all-embracing, Jerusalem a witness to the heavenly city where when he comes again there will be no divisions, no territorial conflict, where the chosen people are a people from all races, all backgrounds, where zealotry and walls are broken down. He calls us, he calls the world out of our single-mindedness into a vision of what Jerusalem, of what the City of God, is and can be. Of a world which is interconnected between peoples and between peoples and our beautiful God-given planet we are called to embrace and protect. The vision of a new creation and a new era which will learn from the mistakes of the past and present and show forth a new hope for our world.
I wonder how you feel about where we are as God’s People? I wonder how this season is speaking to you as we begin to go about our daily business and even see glimmers of hope, of light at the end of the long COVID tunnel? Advent takes us to this desert place to reflect in silence and stillness but the figure of John doesn’t want us to stay there but to bring us to the oasis of our lives, to drink from the living streams which flow from the Lord’s side, which spill out into the life of the sacraments we continue to celebrate in churches up and down the country and across the world. In communities where the Eucharist is lived out in an increased concern for the weakest and most needy. In the Church where, despite everything, new people are welcomed and we want to offer them hope for a brighter future. Called to the bank of the Jordan to embrace the promised land beyond the wilderness in us all, to the one who is far greater than the prophet John and far beyond our daily expectations. That is Jesus Christ who will come again and lead us from slavery to freedom.
But how, we may well ask, how will we know that hope? How will we know of our freedom? How will we know Jesus? Surely it is only through the witness of our lives, the witness of our lives to his Gospel. We are thus called to prepare a place for him in our world, to take the reins and rebuild his Kingdom, to be his heralds, confident he has always been with us even in the midst of tragedy, fear, anxiety, frustration, depression, doubt. We are today’s John the Baptists, so sure he never abandons his creation, he will work through us, so even in the most silent human desert we hear the proclamation of joy and hope again.
Fr Dominic Robinson SJ