Today’s readings: Isaiah 40, 1-5.9-11; 2 Peter 3, 8-14; Mark 1, 1-8

Today’s Scriptures speak about the need in life to cross the desert and to let the desert teach us. The desert reminds us of the need to let go of all that is incomplete and unnecessary in us.

The message is basically about our regeneration. God’s incarnation in Jesus stands for the way history is regenerated precisely at that point where our historical projects seem to be exhausted.

This regeneration though, occurs in the wilderness instead of in the temple. As we read in Mark, people were coming from Jerusalem to the margins to be baptised. The context in which the oldest gospel presents Jesus is not in the midst of the city, or in the sacred spaces guarded by the religious powers that be.

In the first reading, Isaiah uses the image of a ‘highway in the desert’, suggesting a way home for the displaced people of God. It serves the motif of homecoming which can be very in tune with what we are supposed to feel and imagine in the Advent season. Crossing the desert in this context means going back to the roots of one’s existence, going to ground zero, where one’s religious and spiritual security once stood.

Talk about God is serious, deep and intriguing, and we always need to prepare the soil if we want to make sense of whatever He reveals to us. In religion we take so much for granted, we consider many things as given, we are tempted to build always on what may eventually not turn out to be solid ground.

In the second reading, St Peter writes that “the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up”. It gives the idea of destruction, of ruins over which God will build something new. God’s agenda does not always coincide with ours, or even with what we project in our religion. To grasp in depth God’s presence in our midst, we need a different standpoint from where to look at things and judge reality.

In the times in which we live now, we seem to have the feeling of seeing things that once looked so solid as simply melting down. The imagery of the end of time stands for the void that needs to be created in order for us to feel the real need for a Messiah who saves. But if we fail to come to terms with what is enslaving in our lives, how can we realise that we need to be liberated?

The faith of the early Christians rested precisely on this void, represented in the devastation of Jerusalem and the temple. Those who clinged to the old, continued to find it so difficult to perceive Jesus as the Lord and Messiah.

The good news of the gospel was meant first and foremost to shake securities, to shake even today those religious certainties which many a time fail to make us meet up with our realities. We realise how difficult it is in this day and age to proclaim credibly and with power that the one born in Bethlehem so long ago is the saviour of humanity.

On various counts we are failing miserably to drive the message home, in spite of all the Christmas paraphernalia that still sticks. As the gospel itself today indicates, the first baptism with water guarantees nothing at all.

There needs to be more depth in the way we handle our faith and beliefs. With John the Baptist, we need to distance ourselves from our certainties and sure standpoints and return to the desert where we can face honestly who we are and what we stand for.

Christmas is not hailed as a time of peace. Isaiah speaks of consolation, but that presupposes that “every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be laid low, every cliff become a plain”.

The Baptist further proclaims a “baptism of repentance”. They both provide us with that radical standpoint from where to judge the truth we are living for and the reality around us. Otherwise we risk complacency, and not accounting for our complicity with the old ways which make us miss God’s alternative agenda.

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