Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent (A)

Last week I pointed out that John the Baptist is one of the key figures of the Advent Scriptures – that he fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah, of one crying out in the desert: “make straight the way of the Lord.” And in today’s Gospel, citing another passage from the prophet Malachi, Jesus Himself confirms that John is the one sent to prepare the way for the promised Messiah.

It’s precisely for these reasons, that at first glance, today’s Gospel can almost be scandalous. John the Baptist has sent his disciples to Jesus to ask: “Are you the One who is to come, or should we wait for another?”

Now, mind you, this is the same John who as a child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped for joy when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, came to visit them.

This is the same John who foretold the coming of one greater-than-he. The same John who Baptized Jesus in the Jordan and heard the voice from Heaven saying, “This is my beloved Son.”

This is the same John who pointed his disciples toward Jesus, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

How can it possibly be, then, that this same John the Baptist now asks Jesus if He is the one for whom the world had been waiting? How dare he, we might say. We would love to have the kind of certainty, the kind of proofs that John was given – and yet he has the nerve to doubt, to question if Jesus is really the Messiah?

What’s changed, we might ask? What has made John seemingly forget all he had once known so well?

Yes, John had been able to witness to Christ at the Jordan, in a moment of fulfillment that gave meaning to the entirety of his life and mission. But now, Matthew’s Gospel tells us that John was in prison, about to be beheaded by King Herod. He was facing the seeming failure of his entire mission – a failure so utterly complete that the glorious moments of his life, the moments of clarity and faith, “seemed to have been cancelled out” completely. That’s what had changed.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be scandalized after all. Maybe, in the end, we can have some compassion for John – we can relate to how he must have felt. Because we too have had moments of clarity – moments when we are completely convinced of God’s closeness and love – moments of faith, when we found it easy to believe and easy to follow.

And then, we have also had moments of doubt – moments when everything seemed to be going so completely wrong that we found it nearly impossible to believe – nearly impossible to trust in God’s promises.

Friends, it’s exactly to those moments of darkness and uncertainty, that the joyful hope of this Advent season – of this Gaudete Sunday – speaks most directly. And what exactly is the message this season speaks to us?

Well, the season of Advent has a kind of modern day apostle in Father Alfred Delp. He was a German Catholic priest imprisoned and murdered by the Nazi government during the Second World War. Like John the Baptist, Fr. Delp faced the failure of his entire life’s mission. He witnessed an evil regime take his country by force, saw the ravages of war all around him, and then in the end, faced the torture of prison and a sentence of death.

He wrote a powerful set of “Prison Diaries” and, though I rarely do this, I want to read to you from it, because I think it tells us so well the message Advent intends to give us. Fr. Delp writes:

“Advent, even when things are going wrong, is a period from which a message can be drawn. May the time never come when men forget about the good tidings and promises, when, so immured within the four walls of their prison that their eyes are so dimmed, they see nothing but grey days through barred windows . . . The first thing man must do if he wants to raise himself out of this sterile life is to open his heart to the golden seed which God’s angels are waiting to sow in it.”

“And one other thing; he must himself throughout these grey days go forth as a bringer of glad tidings. There is so much despair that cries out for comfort; there is so much faint courage that needs to be reinforced; there is so much perplexity that yearns for reasons and meanings. God’s messengers, who have themselves reaped the fruits of divine seeds sown even in the darkest hours, know how to wait for the fullness of harvest.”

Friends, we know that Advent is a season of patient waiting, and Fr. Delp is clearly echoing St. James, who said, in the brief section of his letter that we heard in our second reading: “be patient brothers and sisters . . . make your hearts firm.”

But Fr. Delp is also imploring us to heed the words of Isaiah from our first reading, to be heralds of glad tidings: “Strengthen the hands that are feeble,” Isaiah says; “Make firm the knees that are weak, say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not, here is your God, He comes to save you!”

It seems clear, from John the Baptist’s experience, and from the Diary of Fr. Delp, that actively proclaiming the glad tidings of salvation – being a messenger of joy and hope – is itself a means of watering and nurturing the seed of Divine life planted within our hearts – it’s precisely how we keep ourselves from ever forgetting or doubting all we have seen and believed.

This, then, is true Advent patience; true Advent waiting. It is not a passive – it is active, and not just with nervous, fretful preparation. Advent is an active proclamation to the world’s many needs, of our faith and hope in salvation. And it is especially such a proclamation to the many eyes for whom Isaiah’s vision of a desert blooming with abundant flowers seems a mere hallucination.

You will note, of course, that our Third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday, is a Rose Sunday. In the midst of our Advent waiting and hoping, in the midst of our prayer and penance, we are reminded of the Divine seed that has been planted within us – and we are confirmed in our faith that a flower is indeed blooming in winter – a rose, sprung from Jesse’s stem: Jesus the Christ!

And this year, a coincidence of the calendar gives us yet another source of hope. Many of you will know that if today, December 12th, were not a Sunday, we would be celebrating the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe: the commemoration of our Blessed Mother’s appearance, in 1531, to St. Juan Diego on the hill at Tepeyac, outside Mexico City.

In the middle of December, to prove that she was who she said she was, Mary made roses bloom on that hill. And when Juan Diego collected those roses in his cloak, and then dropped them at the feet of the bishop, the image of Mary was there, on his cloak, where the roses had been.

Mary comforted Juan Diego that day, saying in his native tongue: “Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the fountain of your joy? Are you not in the fold of my mantle, in the cradle of my arms?”

Brothers and sisters as we move toward the conclusion of our Advent journey, Our Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Guadalupe, once again gives us roses – a sign of the Son she bore to the world, and of her motherly care and protection for us. May our Advent mission to be heralds of these glad tidings, help nurture and bring to maturity the seeds Christ has sown in the fields of His Church.