Second Sunday of Advent – 2021
Christmas is associated with family for us, and often enough with family reunion. Maybe family members who have been away for awhile are coming back home. Christmas is often a time, too, when we re-unite with friends with whom we have not been able to enjoy a great deal of contact over the year.
Christmas is an expectant time, and as the time towards Christmas becomes shorter we are full of expectancy about it – even if this expectancy from time to time becomes a kind of dread! 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. We are those who believe that an altogether new reality has been birthed in our midst, is being birthed, and will be birthed. 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.
We are people of expectation, but 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 this new reality in our midst, in the person of Jesus, then there would be nothing for which to wait. 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.
However, at Christmas we not only celebrate the 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. Therefore, between God’s past coming and his future coming we are not simply trapped in some kind of transit lounge, where we idly wait, filling in time, as it were, nonchalant about what is happening in the world. As the beginning of the Gospel today illustrates, this birthing of the life of God in our midst 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? 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. When we open the doors of our hearts in a new way then the life of God is birthed again in our world.
May that birth, past, present and future, fill us all with a new sense of wonder this Christmas.