“The crowds asked John the Baptist, “What should we do?”
(Luke 3:10)
On this Sunday of joy in which
we light the rose colored candle to signal that Christmas is drawing nearer and
nearer, we gather to listen to the words of Scripture. The people gather around John the Baptist “with
great expectation” thinking that he is the Christ asking “what should we do?”
because they long for salvation. St.
Paul exhorts the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord always, and in the first reading
from the prophet Zephaniah we are told to shout for joy and sing joyfully because
the king, the Lord, is in our midst.
The Book of Zephaniah is a
small book towards the back of the Old Testament that only has three
chapters. Yesterday, I was discussing
the first reading with a priest friend of mine as we were exchanging homily
ideas and he told me to look at the first verses of chapter 3 (we start reading
from verse 14 in today’s reading.) The
first verses strike a far different tone:
“Ah! Rebellious and polluted, the
tyrannical city! It listens to no voice,
accepts no correction; In the
Lord it has not trusted, nor drawn near to its God. (v. 1-2)”
(Read that verse and think of our world, our
nation right now…I’ll come back to it later.)
Verses 8 and 9 say: “Therefore, wait for me—oracle
of the LORD—until the day when I arise as accuser; for it is my
decision to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, in order to pour out upon them
my wrath, all my blazing anger; for in the fire of my passion all the earth
will be consumed.
For then I will make pure the speech of the peoples, that
they all may call upon the name of the Lord.”
When I read those 4 verses, I
told my friend that I did not want to focus on the wrath of God on this Sunday
that is supposed to be dedicated to joy.
But I was thinking like humans do and not like God. We think of wrath and we think of violence
and destruction, but God’s wrath aims to restore and purify. As my friend pointed out to me, “After the
wrath of God there is restoration. The
world may show us a wrath that is not God’s [since] God’s wrath is passion for
restoring what has been broken or people who have turned away from him. [Therefore] if God wants to restore what is
broken…then what we see in Connecticut, Oregon, Arizona, Virginia Tech, [Aurora],
and everywhere else, we must trust that God WANTS to restore, but more importantly,
we must TRUST that God is ever present in our world.”
And there it is…
It may seem difficult to see
God in this world when we see what happened in that small town in Connecticut
on Friday, but somehow, like we did in 9/11 and all those tragedies listed
above, we must seek Him amidst the horrors of this world because ultimately our
hope comes only from above.
There is only one solution to
what ails this nation. His name is Jesus
Christ. Now more than ever we must allow
Christ to be born in the hearts all men and women. Yes, there are no simple nor immediate
solutions to this recent wave of shootings.
We simply pray and turn to Christ. This one in particular struck a very raw nerve
for me as it did for all of us because it involved children. And in my anger, my confusion, and in the
heat of the moment I vented, like most of us do, on social media. I made comment, a very simplistic comment at
that, about ridding guns off our streets because when something bad happens you
want to point the finger at something or someone. (I took it down because it
sparked a furor the likes of which I’ve never seen on my page and was diverting
attention from the fact that we needed to pray for the victims and for these
children and their families. Yet, a part
of me wishes that some of these people where as passionate about the Gospel as
they are about their guns.) I know this
issue is very complex and reaches farther than just mere gun control but wouldn’t
we all want to live in a world where arms and violence did not exist. But like I said, it’s not that simple. I’m just a priest that likes to keep his eyes
and his dreams fixed on heaven praying that we may experience some of that
paradise down here. The only solution is
to center our lives, our culture, and most importantly our families on Jesus
Christ. He must reign in each and every
one of our hearts so that we can slowly start to transform this culture of
death that glorifies violence, and like the first verse of the third chapter of
Zephaniah said, transform a city, a nation, a people, and a culture that does not
hear the voice of God nor draws near to him.
Yet God himself wants to renew and restore this very people. He wants to restore and re-create each one of
us so that we can radiate with the love and the joy of his only begotten Son.
So we come back to the
question that was asked of John the Baptist:
“what should we do?” In a word: repent.
That was the central message of John as prepared the way of the
Lord. We repent by letting God’s holy
wrath overwhelm and cleanse our hearts of all impurities so that we can be
bearers of his joy just like Mary was the bearer of Joy himself: Christ the
Lord.
Even though we approach the
altar of the Lord with heavy hearts this Sunday, we must not let anyone take
away the joy that Christ has given to us and that we so eagerly expect this
Christmas. We mourn as a nation, but we
also pray for our nation that we may return to the Lord so that we may never
experience this sorrow again. Accept the
invitation the Lord is offering you to be cleanse your heart in the sacrament
of confession this Advent so that we may be ready to receive Him with hearts
restored and renewed this Christmas.
Then we will be able to spread his joy one person at a time and slowly
start turning our nation back to God.
Our world, now more than ever, needs this joy, needs repentance, needs
this Jesus.
Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly!
