Giles Fraser, an Anglican priest who is rather famous in England, always asks members of the clergy whom he interviews on his podcast, fittingly called Confessions with Giles Fraser, what is the main thrust of their preaching. Since I will likely never be interviewed by Giles, I posed this question to myself. My answer would have to be: “The main point of my preaching is hope lies beyond optimism.”
In our epistle reading, Saint Paul addresses this directly when he writes: “that we might have hope through endurance.”1 Indeed, you can develop hope in no other way than through endurance. Hope is born from the labor of enduring life's ups and downs, but especially life’s downs. According to Theo-logic, crucifixion always precedes resurrection. After all, the wood of the manger becomes the wood of the cross.
When we think about this with reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary, her fiat, her yes, expressed in the words, “May it be done to me according to your word,” far from making us sentimental should help us understand the risk she took by saying “Yes” to God.2 Under the law, the penalty for an unmarried woman turning up pregnant was death by stoning.
Eugene Peterson expressed the idea of hope lies beyond optimism very well: “When nothing we can do makes any difference and we are left standing around empty-handed and clueless, we are ready for God to create. When the conditions in which we live seem totally alien to life and salvation, we are reduced to waiting for God to do what only God can do, create.”3
What is the difference between hope and optimism? Optimism convinces you that you’ll figure it out and get everything under control. Hope steps in when you realize you don’t have a clue and you’ve no idea what’s going to happen. Hope is trust in God and not mere wishing. As such, hope is the flower of faith.
Our first reading from Isaiah is an expression of hope. It is likely passages like this Saint Paul had in mind when he wrote that hope not only comes from endurance but “through the scriptures’ consolations.”4 By prophesying that “on that day the root of Jesse… shall become a banner to the nations” and that “Nations shall seek him out and his resting place shall be glory,” the Scriptures Paul references bring hope not only to Israel but to the whole world.5
In his commentary on the tenth verse of the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, Robert Alter asserts that the phrase “his resting place” is typically “used for a place of settlement that is safe from enemies.”6 He goes on to say that its use at the end of this passage is likely “to resonate with the spirit of the LORD that ‘shall rest’ on the ideal king.”7 It is on the ideal king that this passage is focused. Of course, from a Christian perspective, Jesus of Nazareth is the ideal king whose Advent, or coming, Isaiah is predicting.
The Preaching of John the Baptist, by Alessandro Allori, between 1601 and 1603
Of course, it is the kingdom of which Jesus is the king, which, in the end, will be the only kingdom, that John the Baptist seeks to usher in with his words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”8 The word “repent” in this passage is the Greek word metanoeite. It comes from the word metanoia and means “to have a change of heart.”9
As we look forward to Jesus’s return at the end of time, which is something the first two weeks of Advent, extending from the Solemnity of Christ the King, bid us do, we are called upon to have a change of heart, to conform our hearts more to Jesus’s Sacred Heart and his Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart. This is why this afternoon we’re celebrating our annual Advent penance service. This provides you with the opportunity to examine your heart, asking the Lord how you need change, and receiving the grace you need to make these changes through the Sacrament of Penance.
Beginning next Sunday, which is Gaudete Sunday, the relatively short season of Advent takes a turn. We turn our focus from the “not yet” to the “already.” Looking at it from the perspective of this Sunday, it’s important to point out that when Jesus came as a babe in Bethlehem he inaugurated the kingdom of God. “Kingdom” in Greek, the word John uses for it in today’s Gospel, is basileia. Jesus, to use a word coined by the great Church Father, Origen, is autobasileia- the kingdom-in-person.
In his work, On Prayer, Origen noted that people
who pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God pray without any doubt for the Kingdom of God that they contain in themselves, and they pray that this Kingdom might bear fruit and attain its fullness. For in every holy [person] it is God who reigns10If you want God to reign in you and bring his kingdom to completion through you, then you must not allow sin to reign over you.11 Indeed, at Baptism, you rejected “sin so as to live in the freedom of God's children.”12
The Sacrament of Penance is an extension of the Sacrament of Baptism. What better time to be reminded of this than on the Second Sunday of Advent when, each year, we hear the words of the Baptist, the seal of the prophets, which are as relevant now as when he first proclaimed them? Over the remainder of this Advent prepare the Lord’s way by making your heart a straight pathway. It is the Lord himself who helps you do this by the grace he wants to impart to you through confession. I hope that each of us and all of us together receive baptism “with the holy Spirit and fire.”13 And being so transformed, may we seek to usher in God’s kingdom.
1 Romans 15:4 in The New Testament: A Translation, trans. David Bentley Hart, 315.↩
2 Luke 1:38.↩
3 Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology, 64.↩
4 Romans 15:4 in The New Testament, 315.↩
5 Isaiah 11:10 in The Hebrew Bible: A Translation With Commentary: The Prophets, trans. Robert Alter, 660.↩
6 Ibid.↩
7 Ibid.↩
8 Matthew 3:1.↩
9 Matthew 3:1 in The New Testament.↩
10 Cited in Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism of John to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker, 50.↩
11 Romans 6:12.↩
12 Roman Missal, “The Easter Vigil,” sec. 55.↩
13 Matthew 3:11.↩
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