Second Sunday of Advent
I am a planner. Some of you may know that already. My close friends certainly know that. I have been known to call friends and see if they want to go on vacation…ten to eleven months before I am planning to leave. There are a few of my friends who are not planners at all. And it drives them up a wall to no end when I try to arrange times to get together with them. They would much rather see if something will work a week out. Of course, my calendar has a tendency to fill up, so planning something a week out usually means it won’t happen because I’ve already committed to something else…because I’m a planner.
St. John the Baptist may or may not have been a planner. But we heard today about how he was trying to prepare Israel for the Messiah by preaching in the desert and saying, “‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’” He was getting them ready for the day when Israel could take off its robe “of mourning and misery” and “put on the splendor of glory from God” as we heard in our first reading. St. John the Baptist was trying to help them plan for the day when God would clothe them in the righteousness of God, a royal priesthood. This was not something which the Chosen People could simply fall into or start working on a week ahead of time. St. John the Baptist was helping the Chosen People prepare to meet their new king.
And what are we celebrating? We are celebrating a paradox. We celebrate that the God who created Time and who guides it according to His will, became subject to Time in the Person of Jesus. We celebrate that God, Whom the heavens and the earth cannot contain, suddenly was seen as a little infant who took up space and could be located in one place and not another. But this story, though 2,000 years removed from us today, happened in a particular time. And that is hat St. Luke also tries to convey to us. The Birth of Jesus did not happen long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It happened sometime before the “fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee…during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.” God, the Lord of History, in the Person of Jesus became a subject of History as well. Jesus is not a made-up story, like the Greek or other Middle-Eastern stories about the gods. Jesus was seen, heard, touched by many people, who spread that Good News to others.
Have we planned enough for Christmas? Not for the parties, the decorations, or the presents, but to celebrate what Christmas is truly about: God loved us so much that in the Person of Jesus He became man and dwelt among us. Has the message of St. John the Baptist taken root in our hearts? Have we prepared the way of the Lord?
