Third Sunday of Advent – 2020
Most of us are looking forward to New Year’s Eve when we can finally say goodbye to 2020 and all its challenges. In a period of history such as the one in which we have discovered ourselves this last year with the pandemic we glimpse the enormity of the movements in which we are enswirled, our fragility and insignificance before them, whilst at the same time we wonder about new beginnings, about something new emerging. We have the sense that something is passing, we are leaving behind something. We sense that we are crossing over into something unknown and new. We feel both vulnerable and excited at the same time. Fear and hope co-mingle in us.
In the midst of such paradox, our hearts long for certainty as did those of the people around John the Baptist in today’s gospel. Underneath the questions about John’s identity which we hear in today’s gospel lays this anxiety of the paradox of both fear and hope. In their own intuition that they themselves stand on the precipice of dramatic change – one realised in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD – they look for something to hang on to, something which might promise them the immunity of certainty.
The answer that they are given by John is the answer we, in our own paradox of fear and hope, are given today. John points his finger not skyward but in a circle around them. “But standing among you – unknown to you – is the one who is coming after me.” Thus, in the midst of our questions and our anxiety, we are called to look, and look again. We are called to be not unlike those who are peering in front of a holygram. A holygram is one of those pictures which on the surface seem a meaningless set of colours. When we look at it in a certain way from a certain distance, though, it discloses a picture inside it. That is the way we must look at our world, and thus recognise the deepest possibility available to us even in the midst of our own profound uncertainty about the future.
In other words, we not to sit around in fear and gloom, waiting for the catastrophic. Rather, the future will be delivered to us, even in the midst of our uncertainty, to the extent that we keep our gaze on the possibility of what is not only possible, but what is actually occurring even now. Yes, something new is coming into being even now if we can but see it. Something is being birthed. Something is birthed when we make choices for love over hate, hope over fear, life over death. Where despair is transformed into promise, paralysis into new movement, blindness of vision into fresh possibility is where the Kingdom of God births in our time. It is the birthing of this Kingdom, this new order of relationships between us that alone can take us forward into an unknown future. It is what alone can transform the future from threat into possibility. It is what alone can guarantee that something might live even in the face of what might need to die.
And what omen are we given in regard to this? Not a blood red moon, but a baby: the sign of a possibility which does not overwhelm us, or which creates yet further despair, but the sign of a possibility which invites us to stop and think again and act with openness, receptivity and vulnerability towards one another. And for this we light a candle of joy.