3rd Sunday Advent - Year A

During this month, transformation seems to be the order of the day.  In preparation for Christmas, most of us will transform our homes and businesses with decorations that celebrate this happy season.

While this transformation is only a cosmetic and a temporary one, the liturgy for today puts us in touch with a transformation of another sort, viz., the profoundly transformative power of the coming of our God.  Isaiah (35:1-6,10) describes this transformation in terms of a desert blooming and of the fearful and feeble becoming brave and strong.  His vision of the blind gaining their sight, the deaf beginning to hear, the mute being able to speak and the lame leaping bears eloquent witness to the conviction that nothing is impossible for God.  As evidence of the power and possibilities of God at work in him, Jesus, in today’s Gospel (Mt 11:2-11), will allude to these very healings and add to them the even greater transformation of lepers being made whole, the dead being raised and the poor hearing the good news of salvation preached to them.  Like Isaiah before him, Jesus understood that nothing is impossible for God.

The Bible is relentless in its conviction that nothing that is distorted or deathly need remain as it is.  God’s power and God’s passion converge to make total newness possible.  God’s promises of messianic possibility work against our exhaustion, our despair and our sense of hopelessness.

Newness is indeed possible, and this God has affirmed in Jesus.  In embracing this hope, Christians distinguish themselves from those who despair, and from the self-sufficient who believe that they themselves can produce the newness.  To avoid both the despair that kills hope and the pride that ignores grace, believers are called home each Advent to a renewed reliance on God.

For too long we stood on this earth in a false security.  In our spiritual insanity we dared to think that we could, by our own power, avert the dangers and banish the night.  We believed that we could harness everything and order the universe to our liking.  But, over and against our daring and desires stands the message of Advent; it is the Lord, the Coming One who came and who will come again, who will bring about the transformation of our human hearts by Gospel grace.  If we want to transform life again, if Advent is truly to come again, the Advent of home and of hearts, the Advent of the people and the nations – then we must allow ourselves to be shaken and sifted and if need be, to be shattered by grace.