Today’s readings: Isaiah 40,1-5.9-11; 2 Peter 3,8-14; Mark 1,1-8.
There is so much in life that we fail to understand while we are at it, and the significance of which we only grasp with hindsight. Hindsight is the ability to understand an event or situation only after it has happened. In our journey of faith, hindsight is a basic concept.
Scripture itself has been written with hindsight. It is not a journal of happenings as they were unfolding. It evokes major events that marked Israel’s history and points to their real significance, thus giving shape to the faith of Israel. It is the written word of God that stimulates us to discern in our turn the events that mark our lives and eventually give shape to our faith.
Our experience is the unwritten word of God that speaks loud and can only be interpreted with the Scriptures at hand. God’s incarnation, the word became flesh, is not only his birth in Bethlehem but extends also to how God enters our lives, continues to become flesh, and keeps our hope alive, impacting on the faith of present and future generations.
On the first Sunday of Advent the focus was on the need to stay awake and wait for God; but on this second Sunday it is God who patiently waits for us. God is patient with us because His ways can be disruptive of our routine way of seeing and doing things. Christmas stands for God’s disruption par excellence of time and history, coming to us in human form and risking the refusal of humanity.
There is a deeper truth in whatever we go through that can only be discerned in faith. St Mark’s gospel today opens with the words: “The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ”. As long as the gospel is meant to be good news it will always have a fresh beginning. When it simply narrates the past, it is no news at all. John the Baptist declares: “Someone is following me, someone who is more powerful than I am”.
There is always more to come of that which shapes our believing. It is the voice that cries in the wilderness, and which, if not listened to, remains in the wilderness and is lost. Without discernment, even while we proclaim God’s written word, God’s silence can be deafening. Israel experienced this in the long silence preceding the arrival of John the Baptist.
Yet John, a voice in the wilderness, was listened to, and, as St Mark writes, “all Judaea and all the people of Jerusalem made their way to him”. The hope conserved under lock and key in the Temple and in the hands of the religious authorities had lost its authority on people’s lives and no longer spoke to the hearts of the people. The Torah was no longer sufficient by itself.
From the desert, John reconnected with people’s hearts and addressed the void of hope they were experiencing in spite of their religion. For this same reason, people in our days venture beyond the temple religion to encounter God’s nourishing voice in the modern-day wilderness, away from the bustling city, and at times away even from the temple. We all need these wilderness spaces which the Scripture proposes as privileged standpoints from where to discern what is shaping our living and our believing.
It is in these privileged spaces that we can have a glimpse of the truth underneath the facts that can be so overwhelming. The metaphorical desert can give us an outlook on life which our daily busyness does not permit. Isaiah evokes this powerfully when he writes: “Console my people, speak to the heart of Jerusalem and call to her that her time of service is ended”. This is God’s sovereignty, His way of showing up, and His disruptive intervention can effectively be a homecoming for us.