Keep the fire burning

Today’s readings: Zephaniah 3, 14-18; Phil. 4, 4-7; Luke 3, 10-18.

There is no such thing as imposing on someone to be happy. Happiness and joy are conditions of the heart that influence the mind and the way we connect with ourselves and with others.

Yet in today’s second reading St Paul writes: “I want you to be happy”. He speaks of the happiness that comes from the peace of God in our hearts “which is so much greater than we can understand” but which we all desire.

There are always reasons to be in pain, but the Scriptures this Sunday highlight for us the source of true happiness. The prophet Zephaniah lived at a time when God’s people were shifting from the decadent Assyrian empire to the Babylonian empire. In today’s psalm of joy, Zephaniah is seeking to put Yahweh back on the throne where he belongs, given that the people were going through a period of moral degeneration coupled with a spirit of secularism.

His call to “shout for joy” contrasts heavily with the general mood of Zephaniah whose book is marked with a deep sense of tragedy and fear associated with the day of Yahweh as a day of judgment. In fact, Zephaniah served as a major inspiration for the medieval hymn, Dies irae, dies illa, which smacked so much of a negative spirituality but which also profoundly inspired composers like Mozart and Verdi.

In today’s reading the same Zephaniah hails the golden age yet to come for Israel and he is very reassuring: “The Lord has repealed your sentence; he has driven your enemies away.”

This serves a good counterpart for Luke’s version of John the Baptist who also proclaims judgement day as motive for a change of conduct but who focuses mainly on the transformative power of the God who comes.

On its own, religion lacks the power to transform people. That is why the Baptist distinguishes between his baptism and that with the Holy Spirit and fire, insisting that “someone is coming, someone who is more powerful than I am”.

That “more powerful” needs to be deepened further, particularly at a time when we struggle to come to terms with what is actually lacking today in a situation where we still have so much religion but not so much faith.

We live in times when more than ever our true and authentic response in faith is required, otherwise our belonging to a historically Christian generation will simply be like chaff that is thrown into fire. This response in faith, as is indicated by the Baptist, is true justice, which calls for the interruption of those mechanisms of exploitation and corruption that dominate to alarming extents our social and political life.

The headlines these days are adequate indication that this culture is deep-rooted in our institutions.

“What must we do?”, asked the tax collectors and soldiers. Conversion is not simply turning away from evil and sin; it is putting things in order and ordering our priorities.

If our Advent and Christmas liturgies are yearly routines without in any way impinging on all this, then we really are in a bad patch and will find it difficult to stand up and be counted.

Many today who know little and care even less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church continue to be simply put off by what we have to show and the way we account for it.

Christian faith can still be the antidote to these mechanisms of evil and injustice. We can never be comfortable with a society where some shout for joy while many others remain excluded.

We do well to ask ourselves on this Sunday whether we have the wisdom to separate in our lives the wheat from the chaff, whether we still are making choices that keep the Holy Spirit and the fire with which we were baptised still burning.