Second Sunday of Advent: Today’s readings: Baruch 5:1-9; Psalm 126:1-6; Philippians 1:4-11; Luke 3:1-6.
Last August, Greg Epstein, author of Good Without God. What a Billion Non-Religious People do Believe, was elected president of the religious leaders, or chaplains, at Harvard University. Epstein is an atheist. The move respectfully acknowledges that the younger generations are mostly describing themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists, or spiritual but not religious. Indeed, a third of the world’s population does not believe in God.
The front cover of Greg Epstein’s book Good Without God. What a Billion Non-Religious People do BelieveStatistical data shows that younger generations locally tend to be less religious, even if Malta has just ranked fifth as the most religious in the EU. Epstein argues that one can be good without God; that religious people can be as dreadful as non-religious; and that non-religious can be as good as their religious peers. Mirroring ourselves in each other, Epstein contends, provides us with the accurate compass to act in righteousness. Seemingly Epstein is succeeding in bringing together traditionally-sworn enemies, believers and non-believers alike, in mutual understanding and in the search for the common good.
Reflecting on the Harvard experiment, Domenico delle Foglie, from Agenzia SIR, queries whether believers “should start accepting the apparent decline in the search for religious meaning”. Is the world better off without religious beliefs? In particular, delle Foglie purports that Christians should start seriously asking themselves “whether modern man believes that Jesus Christ has nothing more to say to individual consciences about what Christianity means by ‘good life’”.
What do we make of evangelisation in this context? Pope Benedict XVI warned against the dangers of proselytism, and in Evangelii gaudium, Pope Francis admonishes Catholics to distance ourselves from “narcissistic and authoritarian elitism” and from the “self-absorbed Promethean neopelagianism of those who ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style from the past.” (EG, 94).
One might legitimately ask whether the signs of the times are showing us that humanity is perhaps already stepping on new sacred ground. The prophecy of Baruch in today’s first reading, that God is gathering “children from the east and the west,” and that “lofty mountains be made low and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground” should thrust us to be sensible to the unassuming signs pointing to the manner the Spirit is effectuating this today.
Recognition of these signs demands a docile readiness to receive from above “knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value” as the Apostle points out in the second reading from the letter to the Philippians.
The gospel underlines the truth that God’s revelation takes place in the unfolding of tangible human history. Luke recalls that it was in a particular historical moment, that the Word of God came to the prophet John the Baptist, incisively “in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas”.
Advent is the time when Christ’s faithful are summoned to take seriously the Word of God irrupting in the here and now of human history
Advent is the time when Christ’s faithful are summoned to take seriously the Word of God irrupting in the here and now of human history, challenging and surprising believers to come to grips with the logos incarnandus, the divine Word who incarnates itself anew, demanding of us to rethink and reshape ourselves according to the signs of the times.
Are you prepared?