Καθολικός διάκονος: Year A Second Sunday of Advent

Sunday, December 7, 2025

Year A Second Sunday of Advent

Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-2; 7-8; 12-13; 17; Romans 15:4-9; Matthew 3:1-12

The question is sometimes asked, “What is the main thrust of your preaching?” I think has to preach for quite a few years before discernible patterns emerge. My answer to this question certainly includes something like, “One of the main points of my preaching is that hope lies beyond optimism.”

In our second reading, taken from Romans, Saint Paul addresses this directly when he writes: “that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”¹ Indeed, hope can’t be developed in any other way than through endurance. While it can be said that hope is born from the labor of enduring life's ups and downs, hope arises especially by enduring life’s downs. According to theo-logic, crucifixion always precedes resurrection. As we rush toward Christmas, barely stopping to prepare ourselves, it bears noting that the wood of the manger becomes the wood of the cross.

Eugene Peterson expressed the nature of hope quite 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 ²

What is the difference between hope and optimism? Optimism is being convinced that you’ll figure it out and get everything under control and realize, if not your desired outcome, at least one that is acceptable. Hope steps in when you realize you don’t have a clue, you’ve no idea what’s going to happen, and you’re not likely to figure it out, at least not on your own.

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 encouragement of the scriptures.”³ By prophesying that “on that [non-specific] day [sometime in the future] 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, whose prospects look dim in the context in which this was written, but to the whole world.⁴

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.”⁵ 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.”⁶ Of course, from a Christian perspective, Jesus Christ is the ideal king whose Advent, or coming, Isaiah is predicting, for which Israel is waiting, and in whom they’ve placed their hope during this dark time.

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 announces announce with the words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”⁷ 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,” to change from the inside out, to be completely transformed, that is, converted.⁸

John the Bapstist Preaching, by Mattia Preti (Il Cavaliere Calabrese), ca. 1665

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 end of the last liturgical year, 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 the Sacrament of Penace, or confession, is not only mentioned more but is made more available during Advent.

Beginning next Sunday, which is Gaudete Sunday, the relatively short season of Advent takes a turn, makes a pivot. We turn our focus from the “not yet” to the “already.” But between the already and the not yet is now, today. As we heard on the First Sunday of Advent- it’s later than you think!

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 in today’s Gospel, is basileia. Jesus, to use a word coined by the Church Father, Origen, is autobasileia- the kingdom-in-person. Where Christ is, there is the Kingdom.

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 reigns⁹

If you want God to reign in you and bring his kingdom to completion in and through you, then you must not allow sin to reign over you.¹⁰ Indeed, at Baptism, you rejected “sin so as to live in the freedom of God's children.”¹¹

The Sacrament of Penance is an extension 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? And so, over the remainder of this Advent prepare the Lord’s way by making your heart a straight path. Go to confession and experience for yourself God’s love and mercy.

I hope that each of us and all of us together receive that baptism “with the holy Spirit and fire.”¹² And being so transformed, strive to make God’s Kingdom a present reality, for Christ to be born in us. As the second verse of the old hymn goes: