Dear Friends,
Welcome to the Second Sunday of Advent. We continue preparing our hearts and minds for the coming of Christ at Christmas and his second coming at the end of time. The Second Sunday always belongs to John the Baptist who prepared for the first coming of Jesus into our world.
Today in the gospel, he says what especially deserved divine judgment was complacency in privilege: “And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” “Give some evidence that you mean to reform.” From the story of Abraham forward, the Hebrew Scriptures insist that Israel was chosen to be God’s people, but the mission was not just for their own sake, they were to benefit the nations. Privilege was meant for universal service. That same message is to be heard today by us. The People of God have a mission to be a light for the nations. How we live, how we act, how we talk, should give people hope and help them to encounter their God.
In our very secular world Christians often get critiqued about many things and so it can be a challenge sometimes to remain a light when our beliefs are being put down. One of the common critiques of Christians is about the origins of our celebrations. For example, we commonly hear that the date of Christmas was chosen by the Church to replace the pagan feast of Saturnalia which took place around the winter solstice. While Christmas did, in the end, overtake that celebration it was not chosen to replace it. The first mention of the December 25 date for the birth of Jesus comes during the age of the martyrs hundreds of years before the church even began of celebrate openly the birth of Christ. Bishop Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170 AD – c. 235 AD) wrote a commentary on the Book of Daniel sometime around 200 AD in which he claimed: “The first coming of our Lord, that in the flesh, in which he was born at Bethlehem, took place eight days before the Kalends of January, a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of the reign of Augustus, 5500 years from Adam.” This puts the birth of Christ at December 25, 2 BC. Another person, Julius Sextus Africanus, claimed the same date in his book Chronographiai, which was written around the same time as Hippolytus’ writings. When Hippolytus declared the date then, there was absolutely no intention of co-opting a Roman holiday since Christians would not begin to celebrate Christmas for at least another 200 years. When you hear this critique during the upcoming Christmas season, you can let them know that they are probably wrong, but we love them anyway.
Pope Francis said that John the Baptist is a good model for modern Christians. “John was a man who prepared the way for Jesus without taking any of the glory for himself.… When asked if he was the Messiah, John replied that he was just ‘a voice’ who had come ‘to prepare the way of the Lord.’ The second vocation of John the Baptist was to discern, among so many good people, who was the true Messiah. When John saw Jesus passing by, he said to the disciples, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The third vocation of John the Baptist is to diminish himself so that the Lord may grow in the hearts of others… As Christians we too must prepare the way of the Lord, we must discern the truth and we must diminish ourselves so that the Lord can grow in our hearts and in the souls of others.”
Peace,
Fr. Damian