Second Sunday of Advent - Repent!

The basic four-week theme of Advent throughout the three years of the lectionary cycle breaks down to: the first week of Advent focuses on the Second Coming of Jesus; weeks two and three meditate on the figure of John the Baptist, and week four zooms in on the days just before the birth of Jesus.

Today, our Readings introduce, or re-introduce, us to the bigger-than-life figure of John the Baptist. History records that John the Baptist was the pre-immanent preacher before Jesus arrived. He was a sort of “Billy Graham” of his times, drawing stadium-sized crowds even while preaching in the wilderness. The crowds flocked to John not merely because he had a “feel good message” that all are saved with no work of faith required. Rather, John’s message portrayed the stark reality that we need to repent wholeheartedly of our sins before the coming of the Messiah.

The word “repent” in the original Greek is translated as “metanoai.” Metanoai means a changing of the mind or a changing of conviction that results in a change of action. In this sense, repent is similar to the English word of reposition in which you have to change your current path to a new trajectory. After all, God says “yes” to us, but before we can say yes to God, we have to say “no” to all those things (i.e. sin) that take us away from God. Many people tend to downplay repentance because they get caught up in the fact that God loves us no matter what are sins look like. That is true, but with repentance, we’re not asking does God love us (we already know that it’s a given). We are fixating on the question – do you love God? We might think, yes, I do love God. But, to love God, you have to not be attached to all those things that are opposite of God. And to love God, you have to give up yourself entirely to Him with no strings attached. This is where you have to walk away from loving the things that stand as an impediment to giving yourself to God. An analogy will help clarify. Before I say “I do” to my wife, I had to be in the position to say “I don’t” to every other woman on the face of the earth. My “I do” to my wife would be utterly meaningless if I couldn’t say “I don’t” to every woman who wasn’t my wife.  Therefore, I had to have an interior disposition to walk away from all avenues that negatively affected giving myself completely to my wife. In this sense, a person needs to remove loving other things – be it sports, career, money, etc. as greater than loving their spouse. Well, the same concept applies to God but on a much larger scale. All the messages in our world that run counter to God’s message need to be flushed out from the human psyche. All the acts of pride, laziness, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, and anxiety need to be renounced and let go otherwise, truly loving God will be a dead end. To be sure, in the devil’s sin-infested world, he sets a trap so people become hooked to these vectors of darkness. While it might seem daunting to have them completely removed, repentance calls the person to start verbally disavowing them. Once the sins are denounced on the interior, God will provide the graces to begin flushing them out.

As we can see, repentance becomes a prerequisite before God can come into our lives. Now we begin to see the significance of John’s message – before goodness can enter into us, we need to go through the process of purification. Church father, Maximus of Turin, saw a deep meaning to this theme from John being described as a “voice crying out.” As he suggested, “Voice and crying go together; the voice preaches the faith; the cry calls for repentance; the voice comforts, the cry calls out for danger; the voice signs mercy, the cry sounds of judgment.”

After John had the people repent and acknowledge their sins, he baptized them. This whole process was quite an act of humility on the part of the Jews because it was tantamount to admitting that they were ritually unclean and needed a whole-body washing. It was incredibly humiliating to acknowledge sin publicly, as usually sin was only acknowledged to a priest when bringing a sacrifice. Notice that the prouder among the Jews, the Pharisees and Sadducees, did not receive John’s baptism.

Despite his blunt message, we see that the crowds that came shared a great deal of faith in John. Coincidentally, the theme of the second Sunday of Advent is faith. Faith is not some state of feeling we get ourselves into. As Peter Kreeft notes, “Faith is simply believing in God and therefore believing everything He has revealed — no matter how we feel.” While external things influence feelings, faith is given from within and calls for an act of the will. This Advent, let us make an act of faith and repent so Christ can fully enter our lives.