Company's Coming!

The Catholic Liturgy for the Second Sunday of Advent, Dec. 8, 2019. Gospel of Matthew 3:1-12. Theme: Company’s Coming!

When I was growing up my mother always kept an immaculate house. Everything was neat and tidy and in its place.  But, whenever special guests were due to pay a visit we would hear her announcement to “clean up your room, straighten out your things, company’s coming.” This is precisely what St. John the Baptist is telling us in today’s Gospel.  “Clean up your minds. Straighten out your hearts. Get your priorities in order because the Promised Visitor, the Messiah and Chosen One is coming!”

John reminds us that preparing for Jesus – what he calls repenting in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven - requires work, intentional effort.  It’s not just something to be done at the last minute or without much thought if we want our relationship with God to be real and meaningful in our lives.  Today’s gospel reminds us that in order to experience the reality of God’s power and presence in our lives, we must have an authentic change of heart, a heart that is no longer focused on self. And this change of heart will then reveal itself in a resulting change in our behavior. We will make choices that reflect and spread the Gospel and Kingdom of Christ around us.

Now, I think that most of us are willing to admit that there is, indeed, a need to clean up our lives.  But we’re not always fully aware of or accurate about what this should look like. Going back to the example of cleaning up my room when I was a kid, I think of how I would do it quickly and to a degree that I thought was heroic, only to have my mother take one look and shake her head in dismay. This was because I didn’t put my heart into it but just did the job superficially, only enough work to make it look somewhat better.

In much the same way, I think we often make our personal inventory of what needs to change in our lives just from our own self-serving point of view.  And, we typically take the easy way out. In so doing we fool ourselves into thinking we’ve doing quite a fantastic job of it! But I think that we need to have Christ come and stand at the door of our heart, peer inside us, and see what his reaction is. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to me I think Jesus will be standing at the door to my heart doing a lot of head-shaking!  

If we are truly sincere about wanting to prepare the way for Christ to come into our lives it’s not sufficient for us to just try and be a little bit nicer, a little bit more thoughtful.  We need to go deeper and get to the root of our negative thoughts and actions.  We need to take the axe, as St. John says in today’s Gospel, and hack away at the roots of our selfishness. In the silence of our hearts alone with God in prayer we need to really ask, “what makes me act that way?”, “why am I being so sensitive about this or that?”, “how come this person always sets me off?”

And of course, after asking we really need to want to hear the answer! And once we hear it, we need to get busy cooperating with God’s grace to be spiritually and emotionally healed of the wounds that cause us to sin.  How do we do this? By taking up the axe of prayer and penance through which God can change our selfish hearts into hearts of mercy, hearts that are open to his presence and power in our lives.

By daily prayer we grow in our conscious contact with God and deepen our relationship with him.  We need to intentionally make time for silence in our day so that we can really pray and be able to hear God speaking to our hearts.  Without this daily communion with God in prayer we will be forever just spinning our spiritual wheels and cleaning up the room of our heart in a superficial manner so to speak.

By penance, which means intentional actions aimed at decreasing self-centeredness, we learn to say “no” to ourselves and “yes” to God and others. Penance is a totally personal thing that needs to be tailor-made for our own particular tendencies and behaviors. But one thing that we would all have in common in this regard is that a truly effective penance will be something that challenges us, that helps us to step up and out of our selfish zone for the sake of others.

Both prayer and penance open our hearts to mercy, which means having compassion on others. It is love expressed in good deeds of every kind towards all people. This love, this mercy, is precisely why Christ came to planet Earth in the first place. And this love that is called mercy is the whole reason why we are spending these days of Advent preparing a pathway for the Lord into our lives and, through us, into the lives of those with whom we live, work and socialize.