Third Sunday of Advent – 15 December 2024
I think from every account we would say that the past year has been eventful in our world. The events that have played out on different levels continue to suggest that we are not only in an era of change but a change of era. Changing moments evoke the paradox of fear and hope deep within us. We glimpse the enormity of time and our fragility and insignificance before it 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.
Each of us may not be conscious of these ambivalent feelings, but I do believe they characterise our age as a whole. Fear and hope seem contradictory. But they can co-exist in the human heart and when left there unresolved they begin to give birth to apocalyptic thinking – a type of thought that expects chaos and disaster, a cataclysmic end of something and a dramatic rescue into the new. It was very present at the time of Jesus; it was strongly evident at the end of the first millennium and we see signs of it in our own time.
Fear and hope. Underneath the questions about John’s identity which we hear in today’s gospel lays this paradox of anxiety. The people around John need to be sure of who he is and his significance. They are looking for something cataclysmic to occur.
The anxiety that surrounds John is the same anxiety that our own age experiences in its own paradox of fear and hope. And even as a Church we are not immune from such feelings. We ourselves are confronted by a whole range of questions. How can our faith grow and develop in this new century in the face of all that seems to compete against it? How can our Church community continue to be an effective sign and presence of the saving mystery of Jesus as the Church’s own sociology changes? How might we speak out the message of the gospel in a way that is full of invitation and promise to a world that is tired of cliche? In a world that is always changing, what can we be certain of anymore? Our hearts long for certainty about these questions as did those of the people around John the Baptist in today’s gospel.
And the answer that we are given by John, is the answer we 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 . . .” In the midst of our questions and our anxiety, we are called to look and look again. In the midst of our anxiety, we are called to listen, to grow in sensitivity to where and how the kingdom of God is inbreaking in our world. How might we do this?
We are called to be not unlike those who are peering in front of a holygram. We know a holygram is one of those pictures which on the surface seems a meaningless set of colours. But when you look at it in a certain way from a certain distance it discloses a picture inside it. That is the way we must look at our world. The Kingdom of God is amongst us but often unknown to us. Can we not see it though?
How does the Kingdom continue to be born in our midst? The Kingdom comes in the unexpected places. It comes in those places where we make choices for love over hate, hope over fear, life over death. It happens whenever we refuse to let cynicism squash our hope, fear overwhelm our love; bitterness overrule our openness, vengeance overtake our forgiveness, convenience and security replace truthfulness. Where is isolation transformed into community, despair into promise, paralysis into new movement, blindness of vision into fresh possibility? This is where the Kingdom births in our time.
Where is all this occurring in us and around us? Only as those who listen and who listen deeply will we be able to hear the birth of the Kingdom in our own time. And the mystery of Christ is birthed still yet further in our world.
