Second Sunday of Advent

December 6, 2009

Bar 5,1-9
Phil 1,4-6.8-11
Lk 3,1-6

Advent is a season of waiting, and waiting can be a long, tiresome, and trying moment. What normally passes like a breeze becomes an eternity when we are counting the moments and waiting for something to happen. And so, during such times, we need people who will continually inspire and console us, lest we give in to sorrow and despair, unsure of whether better days are coming. This is the role Baruch played in the life of the Israelites, supposedly the chosen people of Yahweh, at the time of the Babylonian exile. As the mouthpiece of the prophet Jeremiah, he put into writing the latter’s prophecies and had them announced publicly to the people, thus feeding on their expectations while drawing the ire of despots like Jehoiakim and Nebuchadnezzar. “Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery, for God will show all the earth your splendor,” Baruch would tell the people. “Up, Jerusalem! Stand upon the heights, for God is leading Israel in joy by the light of his glory.”

As the Israelites waited for the hour of their liberation from their Babylonian captivity and their eventual return to Jerusalem, so the Jews hundred of years later would be anxiously expecting the advent of the promised messiah. Life must have been so difficult for the people and the yoke they bore under the Romans so burdensome that they continued to seek consolation from such prophets of old as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Actually, God was all along silently preparing the way for the fulfillment of the promise. And so, the Gospel tells us, “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.” It did not take long before we heard his voice in the wilderness, crying: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”

Baruch (c. 600 B.C.) and John the Baptist  (c. 4 A.D.) are the men given prominence by the Church today to help us sustain our expectation  of the coming of Christ. What John teaches is a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.” If that sounds morbid, all it means is that the best preparation  we can make to welcome the birth of Christ is a transformation of our own self. Repentance implies change, metanoia. We hear John say, “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” In other words, there can be no experience of the Kingdom, no genuine experience of the birth of Christ, without a radical change happening first in ourselves. Christmas may come and go, but if nothing changes in our self, the Season will simply be a mechanical calendar event.

There has to be John to pave the way for Jesus. The call of John is one of radical transformation, so radical that we are transformed into a new man, a ready receptacle for the fresh and unrepeatable experience of something marvelously singular: the birth of Christ to us. When we approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation during this Season of Advent, what a beautiful thing if we truly experience this change of self which  will make us adequately prepared for that moment of Christ’s birth in ourselves.


Bro. Romy Abulad, SVD
Cebu City
(The Word in Other Words)