Sunday 2 Advent (Year B): Hope beyond all hopes
Mark 1:1-8
Humanity has a way of frustrating its own hopes.
In terms of peace, no sooner was the decline of the nuclear threat
within our reach in the 1990’s than terrorism took center stage.
In terms of politics, no sooner does a party (any party) take control
of government (in any country), with promises of untold prosperity, than the human fragility of its leaders disheartens the
public while those in opposition take gleeful revenge, with no small measure of hypocrisy.
In terms of development, no sooner do rich nations sing the sweet
rhetoric of millennium goals, GDP-based assistance and debt relief, than the sour reality of international trade and commerce
leaves the hands of the poor emptier than ever, at the mercy of war, famine and disease.
Sadly, we should not marvel at this. What happens nationally and internationally
reflects what happens individually.
How easily we breathe out the oxygen of ideals, resolutions, even
decisions, while our failure to act makes us breathe in the carbon dioxide of failure, disappointment and sin!
The best potential of human beings can be glimpsed in our rhetoric,
but the worst reality is often what we actually accomplish. We love the idea of the good, but hate the sweat of actually doing
it.
It is like someone in prison looking out the window, imagining all
the great things he could accomplish if he were free, but is humiliated when he cannot turn the handle of his locked door.
And so, be it individually or internationally, we rarely admit our
hopes into the realm of reality. Even our language reflects this: we talk about what “ought” and “should”
take place (at the hands of others, of course); we wonder “what if” and “wouldn’t it be nice if”
we were somebody other than who we are.
Seldom do we say “I will” and act on it. It’s like
a great weight inside us which discourages us from even trying, like an ant faced with moving a mountain.
We feel enmeshed in habits, attitudes and comforts which are so much
easier to accommodate, and so we rationalize and justify our predictable mediocrity.
Thus we reduce our hopes to the world of fantasy and illusion, stuck
like flies in a spider’s web, resigned to moral paralysis and death.
I paint a dull picture, you complain. Yes, I do indeed! But can we
really doubt its truth if the Lord himself has to come to rescue us from it? It is he who has made this dire trait of humanity
no longer inevitable.
The prophet Isaiah voices God’s proclamation to humanity, “your
service is at an end, your guilt is expiated.” And John the Baptist, the last and greatest prophet, proclaims the deliverance
of humanity from despair by crying out, “One mightier than I is coming after me... I baptize you with water, but he
will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
So urgent, so persuasive is John that, as the Gospel tells us, all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the entire
Judean countryside came to him. They detected in his person and in his message something new, something great; they were again
beginning to see in him someone who would give them hope.
The Baptist directs this longing, not only of the Jews but of humanity
itself, to Jesus. But he goes further. As if anticipating the question, “what will this mighty Jesus do for us?”
he says, “he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
For the Jews, the Spirit was the breath of Yahweh which hovered over
the waters and brought order from chaos. He was the breath of God in the nostrils of man by which man himself became a living
being. He was the Spirit who blew back the Red Sea all night to make sure his people’s
path to salvation.
More importantly still, the Jews awaited the promise of the Messiah
( the “anointed one” – anointed precisely with the Holy Spirit) upon whom the Spirit of God would rest,
who would both save and judge, and who would give them this same Spirit so that they would become his people and share in
his resurrection.
In other words, the Baptist not only revived the hopes of the Jews,
but announced their fulfillment in Jesus. Of course, the people expected Jesus to be a political Messiah, like Moses. But
the mission of Jesus far surpasses politics!
It does not fulfill mere human hopes for this life, hopes exploited
by politicians and rarely, if ever, delivered. And even if they were, this life is, in the end, always hopeless as long as death is in the picture.
No matter what hero promises no matter what happiness, so long as
he himself will die, how can his promises truly fulfill the human heart? So long as the human being is not free from death,
what realistic hopes can he have? So long as the grave is the last word on human existence, how can human existence itself
be anything but absurd?
Men may seek immortality in the memories of other men, but those men
too will die.
My friends, the weight we feel upon us that causes us to frustrate
our own hopes and remain enmeshed in our own moral paralysis is ultimately the fear of certain death. Only if death is itself
defeated can any of our hopes be freed from that fear and so rooted in reality.
Jesus, and Jesus alone, did just that. Therefore, a living, real,
sincere and practical union with Jesus, and with all others who share that union, is our only hope. Indeed he is the hope
beyond all hopes.
He is the one on whom we can cast that great weight of death we carry
within. He absorbs that weight into his risen life and casts back into our hearts the sweet yoke of his love. Thus anchored
in Jesus, our hope is secure, not only for the next life, but also for this one.
In Jesus we can, and must, now build a civilization which will last
eternally. A civilization of human genius? Yes, but rooted in a spiritual civilization of love in truth, of peace in justice,
of respect and of freedom.
We can only do this because we have been baptized in the Holy Spirit
unleashed on the world by Jesus through his victory over death. Our baptism was not,
was not, was not an empty ritual, but the gift by which Jesus united us to
his own immortality!
In confirmation, that gift is renewed in us in a way which inspires
us to live and to act for others in the Holy Spirit, with unbreakable hope in our own destiny which is the resurrection from
the dead.
The anchor of human hopes must be lifted up from the earth and cast
into the heart of the Risen Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, those same hopes will run aground in the shallow
waters of the empty, because unfulfillable, promises of men and of their naïve optimism which so many today mistake for real
hope.
As we eat the eternal, life-giving body of Jesus, may the Holy Spirit
rouse our hearts once more to direct the hopes of mankind today to our Risen Lord and King, the definitive hope and final
goal of every human heart.
Msgr. Peter Magee
Sunday, December 4th, 2005
Annunciation, DC: 7.00 am
American University, DC: 11.00 am
