2nd Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 10, 2023

In this Eucharistic celebration, we implore the good Lord to give us the grace in this season of advent to be prepared and ready for the coming of the incarnate Word. Happy Sunday!

DOCTRINE AND FAITH

(Isaiah 40,1-5.9-11; Psalm 84 (85); 2 Peter 3,8-14; Mark 1,1-8; 2nd Sunday of Advent, Year B, December 10, 2023)

“The day of the Lord will come like a thief”, states Peter in his letter (2 Peter 3,10). This is a frequent image in the New Testament; it recurs in all its main sections: in the Synoptics, in Paul, in the Catholic Letters, in the Apocalypse. It is, therefore, the image in which Jesus spoke of his coming, which was very much imprinted in the memory of the first community, and in which the original Christians summarized the attitudes with which to live the expectation of the Kingdom. It is a paradoxical image: the thief tries to surprise; he desires everything except wanting us to prepare for his arrival. On the contrary, Jesus wishes to be awaited for and that his coming to be prepared for, as is recalled on this Sunday by the announcement of the Baptist, sent as a messenger to prepare the way of the Lord. However, the image of the thief, with its disconcerting strength, remains there to remind us that preparing the way does not mean planning the meeting, predicting the ways and circumstances, carefully preparing everything so as not to be surprised. Far from it! No matter how much effort we make, the thief will always surprise us. Ultimately, preparing the way means being willing to be surprised by something new that transforms us. We await - Peter always recalls - new heavens and a new earth which, in their unprecedented character, we can await and hope for, but not imagine or plan. We often confuse hope with the forward projection of our expectations and memories; that is, with the attempt to forever preserve the beautiful things we have experienced, or that we would have liked to experience, if some adverse circumstances had not prevented us from doing so. True hope is something else. About twenty days before his kidnapping, on 8 March 1996, Fr. Christian de Cherge, in a reflection for Lent proposed to the small and troubled Christian community present in Algeria, stated:

“There is hope only where one accepts not to see the future. Let's think about the gift of manna. It was daily. But it couldn't be saved for the next day. Wanting to imagine the future is creating fantasy-hope. The apostles were worried because they only had one loaf of bread. They didn't understand that it was enough. We know who the bread is. If he is with us, the bread will be multiplied. As soon as we think of the future, we think of it as the past. We do not have the imagination of God. Tomorrow it will be something else and we cannot imagine it”.

Surprising us like a thief (rather than taking away) the Lord comes to give, on the condition that we are willing to let something be taken away from us: our possessions, our certainties, our prejudices, our wrong expectations, our wounded memories, to leave room for the new wine with which he wishes to renew the wineskins of our lives, for the new bread - the manna - with which he intends to nourish our paths. As the prophet Isaiah recalls in the first reading, preparing the way for the Lord involves the effort of opening a new way through the desert, raising valleys and lowering mountains and hills; transforming rough terrain into flat terrain and steep terrain into a valley.

John the Baptist himself does not limit himself to proclaiming the urgency of preparing this new path, he himself is the first to experience its needs by entering the desert. This is how we prepare for the coming of the thief: by leaving our usual homes to go into the desert, a place where we experience that life does not depend on our projects or possessions, but on the unexpected gift that comes from elsewhere, which you can only wait for. and not produce, and which will surprise you as something you had not yet experienced or known. In the desert you learn the true art of waiting and hoping. In fact, we discover manna there - man-hu: “what is it?” (see Exodus 16,15) - and we finally understand that what makes us live is a bread that "you did not know and that your fathers never knew" (Deutt 8,3).

Thus, nourished by the manna, we walk in the desert towards the promised land. And we get there not through a linear and flat road, but by straightening twisted paths, leveling the rough terrain, lowering mountains and raising valleys, often losing our bearings, as happens to people who wander for forty years, so as to learn that the path is not the one that we draw on our topographic maps, nor the one that is indicated to us by satellite navigators, but the one that draws in our lives the one who (Isaiah reminds us in the final image of his text) "like a shepherd grazes his flock and gathers them with his arm; he carries the little lambs on his chest and gently leads the mother sheep” (Isaiah 40, 11). Only by maintaining this attitude can we walk towards those new heavens and that new earth that the thief gives to those who allow themselves to be surprised, with joy and not with fear, by his coming.

We will now experience that our efforts and commitments, symbolized by the "baptism of conversion for the forgiveness of sins" (Mark 1,4), necessary and at the same time insufficient, will find their fulfillment from the newness (which does not come from us but reaches from elsewhere) of him who "will baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (Mark 1,8). + John I. Okoye.