Second Sunday of Advent – 7 December 2025
Christmas is often a time when we re-unite not only with family, but also with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year. Even though we may be wondering how we might get through all that needs to be done in the next couple of weeks, I am sure most of us are looking forward to the time of Christmas at which we renew our bonds with one another in such a special way.
Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we have an increasing expectancy about it – I suppose for all kinds of reason. Yet, this kind of expectancy is, in different ways, at the heart of the Christmas mystery, and today’s gospel takes us to this dimension of what we are about to celebrate.
John the Baptist presents as a symbol of expectation. His presence awakens a certain expectation. As Christians, we are those who live in expectation. This sense of expectancy should be a mark of our very identity and even of our lifestyle. It is precisely because of this expectancy that we gather here every Sunday. We are those who live in waiting for something to occur, and that for which we are waiting informs the way in which we live. As Christians, we are not those who believe that time is open-ended, limitless. We are those who believe that time has an end – when an altogether new reality will take the place of what we currently know and experience. We call this new reality the Kingdom of God, a new order of being in which exclusion will be fully transformed into embrace, and all forms of isolation into the experience of communion, and when the mountains and troughs of all forms of alienation, human and ecological, will be overcome.
This waiting is not some idle speculation. We are not hoping against hope. As Christians, we are not simply wishful dreamers or sophisticated positive thinkers. Our waiting and our expectation are given confidence because we believe something has already occurred. Our sense of a future coming is founded on a coming that has occurred in the past. We believe in the future coming of God because we believe that God has already come in the life of Jesus, the One who prefigures all that the future reality is all about. In our memory of him we see and touch our future.
We are people of expectation, and our expectation is defined by two comings: a past coming and a future coming. One makes no sense without the other. If there had not been a past coming of a new reality in our midst, in the person of Jesus, then there would be nothing to wait for. If there was nothing still to come, then our memory of God’s coming in Jesus would be simply an archeological intrigue and be devoid of any transformative capacity for us now.
The celebration of Christmas therefore is about not simply about the past coming of God into our world. It is equally about the future coming of God. This is why John the Baptist remains important in our faith memory. He is for all time the symbol of expectation that should be just as alive for us now as it was for the people to whom he preached.
However, at Christmas we celebrate not just two comings of God, the past and the future. We also celebrate a third coming of God, the coming of God in the present. God has come, is to come and is coming. Our memory of God’s first coming and our expectant waiting for this new reality to fully come, does not make us careless about our world now, as if it were simply a phase to be endured between the past and the future comings. We are not simply trapped in a transit lounge, where we idly wait, filling in time, as it were, nonchalant about what is happening in the world.
Our sense of expectation heightens our awareness of the ways in which God comes into our life now and the opportunities that present to enable God’s life to be more and more birthed in our own time. As the beginning of the gospel today illustrates, God’s coming has an historical concreteness about it. It’s not simply a ‘good idea’ but an historical event, appearing in the midst of all the political, social and economic markers of our time. In the midst of all these dynamics, and not apart from them, we are to be watchful for the signs of God’s coming. What are the things occurring around us in the life of our families, neighborhoods’, communities and nation that present as indicators of God’s coming? We need to be as watchful for these current comings of God, as we do for the future coming of God, as we remain faithful to the past coming of God.
John the Baptist helps us identify the way in which God comes even now: in those initiatives that break the cycles in which people become entrapped, unable to advance along the roads which lead them to their humanity. When we work against exclusion, isolation, estrangement, alienation, and the fear, cynicism and despair that generate them, then God is birthed in our own time and in our own place. When we create that sense of community with one another in which our truth as persons becomes most apparent, then God’s life breaks anew into our midst. And all of this happens in the simplest ways – through a kind gesture, a kind word – all the little ways we build bridges in our lives, rather than construct walls and barriers between ourselves.
May that birth, past, present and future, fill us all with a new sense of wonder this Christmas.
