From L’Osservatore Romano
This Sunday, we start our sacred listening of the readings below a walkway in a kind of celestial fashion show: God’s favourite, the personified Jerusalem, changes her clothes from dismal to dazzling and the dazzling is no meretricious superficiality but rather a reflection of the divine goodness and integrity. That walkway then becomes an upward path and from on high, Jerusalem gazes upon a miracle of centring as her scattered children are drawn together across a transformed landscape of easy roads and fragrant shade.
This is the poetic vision of Baruch in the first reading and for those who appreciate evocative images, the text deserves a moment of meditation. It is also the message of John the Baptist who, in today’s gospel, quotes not Baruch but Isaiah, the great prophet of Advent. The word of God offers us a profound glimpse at a transfiguration that generates a spirit of hope, hope that we need not be locked in a blocked world. This is not an abstract promise delivered ethereally in a make-believe world. Luke’s opening words root the divine invitation in historical reality: the political figures who dominate the Roman empire at the time of John the Baptist are the same people who dominate the world of 2024: all that is different are their names and faces. And even today, prophetic voices cry out in the wilderness, calling us to an integrity of life and to a commitment, determined of course by the concrete reality of our situations, to convert a world so that it is no longer divided and scattered but rather drawn into the light of God’s glory.
In one of his plays, Oscar Wilde wrote: “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. Light and glory permeate today’s Baruch reading. In the darkness of December in the northern hemisphere, the sharp stars, if not overwhelmed by city lights, twinkle a promise that there is more to it all than dirt and squalor. The relatively short season of Advent brings into focus our scattered aspirations and hopes, as we continue our patient watching and waiting for the one who is to come, at the end of time, certainly, but also now, in an unending availability to hearts that are open. The second Sunday of Advent this year falls on December 8, the normal date for the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. May Mary, called Star of the Sea, shine on us with the light of hope.
By Fr Edmund Power, osb