December 9, 2024
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 2nd Sunday of Advent (Year C) on December 8, 2024, at Old St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, IL. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Baruch 5:1-9; Psalm 126; Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11; and Luke 3:1-6.
Back on the first Sunday of Advent, the Church invited us to look forward with joyful hope to when Christ returns at the end of time. On the last Sunday of Advent, we will look backwards 2,000 years to the hope promised by the events immediately preceding the birth of Jesus. But in these two middle Sundays of Advent, we’re asked to consider our hopes in the here and the now.
Our readings today are brimming with hope. They are messages of restoration. Even after the Israelite aristocrats are released from their imprisonment in Babylon – as foretold by the Book of Baruch – they plead in our psalm, “Restore our fortunes, O Lord!” Paul writes to the Philippians of his confidence that “the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it.” John the Baptist proclaims that soon, “all [people] shall see the salvation of the Lord.”
Yet in these promises of hope and restoration, the cry for justice and reform lies just below the surface.
God offers us mercy and peace. Let us respond by preparing the way for the Lord’s kingdom of justice!
For a moment, let’s forget Advent’s invitation to look forward to the end of time and to look backward 2,000 years. Here, today, as we hear these scriptures of salvation and restoration, from what do we want to be saved? To what place and to what time do we desire to be restored?
It’s kind of weird: a lot of people are starting to think of the 2010s as “the good old days.” Since then, we’ve experienced a pandemic. The economic odds are stacked against Millennials and members of Generation Z in ways that Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers never experienced. But do we really want to return to the world before 2020? It was plagued with hyper-partisan politics, out-of-control consumerism, and environmental degradation.
At the time of Baruch in the 6th century B.C., the aristocrats imprisoned in Babylon prayed for their nation to be restored, but they probably weren’t hoping to return to the corrupt, impoverished, unstable kingdom that they had known in their own lifetimes. They were probably pining instead for the relative peace, strength, and prosperity of the early years of the reign of King Solomon, 400 years earlier.
Centuries before Solomon, God imposed an extraordinary practice of restoration called the Jubilee Year. Every 50th year was a special year set aside, like a year-long sabbath. The Book of Leviticus orders the Israelites in each Jubilee Year to give all land back to its original owners, forgive all debts, free all slaves, and allow all fields to lie fallow.
In the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Church began celebrating Jubilee Years, too. Starting with the Jubilee of 1433, pilgrims have flocked to Rome to pass through the Holy Door, a door that is open only during Jubilee Years. It’s not a magic door, but there is certainly a sense of reaching a goal or transitioning into a new season of our lives when we literally cross a threshold like that. Many of us may remember the last Jubilee Year, when Pope Francis held up a wide array of people and causes worthy of salvation and restoration. He encouraged wealthy nations to forgive the debts of poor nations. Francis also asked every diocese in the world to designate at least one holy door within its bounds, so people did not have to take vacation time and spend thousands of dollars to have the spiritual threshold-crossing experience.
Well, guess what? This Advent, we are anticipating crossing a threshold of our own. The Church’s 28th Jubilee Year will begin on Christmas Eve. Record numbers of people will travel to Rome (especially since few people will make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in 2025 while Israelites and Palestinians violently fight over who should now “own” the land that belonged to neither of them at the time of Moses). But once again, there is no need to travel to Rome to cross a new threshold: you can just head up the street to Holy Name Cathedral to reach one of the world’s designated holy doors. We can take a spiritual journey even while staying in one place. In fact, Francis is calling this coming year the “Pilgrims of Hope” Jubilee Year. Whether we travel or not, we can all be pilgrims of hope.
Hope is a gift present to us here and today. So I ask once again: from what do we want to be saved? To what place and to what time do we desire to be restored?
In the United States, our politics are filled with vitriol and antagonism. We want to be saved from that, but how? There is no time in the past in United States history where people of every ethnicity, race, orientation, and economic status in this nation had the equal opportunity to flourish.
The amount of online shopping that we’re doing these days – and all the shipping it requires – is simply astronomical. Despite what the economists say, I don’t think our salvation is going to come in an overnight shipment from FedEx or Amazon.
We can try to restore our carbon output to the levels of the year 1990, but even back then, we were already experiencing the effects of environmental degradation. Can we save the environment and still keep the best of the conveniences of electricity and transportation technology that we enjoy today?
The original Greek in Luke’s gospel says that John the Baptist preached a message of metanoia. We usually translate it as “repentance,” but the word metanoia means so much more. One translation is “change of mind,” and another is “beyond our minds.” I think of it this way: Advent is a time of metanoia, the hope of knowing that God can accomplish things beyond our imaginations. And just imagine how much faster and smoother our restoration and salvation would occur if we changed our minds to cooperate with God’s plans!
People weren’t going out to the desert to see a reed swayed by the wind (ref. Luke 7:24). They were embracing John’s message: for God to restore the world, they each had to sign up to help God’s vision that was beyond their imagining.
It’s not hard to imagine Paul talking about the changes we need to make in government, environmental policy, and consumerism as he wrote to his beloved Philippians. “This is my prayer,” he wrote, “that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.”