Today’s readings: Baruch 5, 1-9; Philippians 1, 3-6. 8-11; Luke 3, 1-6.

What we celebrate every Christmas is that God became man, that God entered history definitively, that the Christian religion is basically the religion of the incarnation. In our celebrations we cannot afford to reverse that process of God entering our categories by ‘spiritualising’ the event to the extent of rendering it other-worldly or even apolitical.

Luke’s gospel today states that God’s word reached John in the wilderness. In the first place, what we should be asking ourselves on this second Sunday of Advent is what constitutes our wilderness now. God’s word reaches us in the wilderness even today, because He always ad­dresses us wherever we are.

What is God’s word is saying about our situations today and where is it finding us? The good news of the gospel is not simply a matter of content or what it conveys. It is also a matter of location or where it is that we stand precisely.

The world needs to be saved from climate change, from terrorism and from corruption, to mention just three major holes today that make life on the planet heavier and more opaque. This is the wilderness where we stand and where we need redemption the most. The voice in the wilderness engaging us all to “prepare a way for the Lord” is a voice that never fades, even if it has become difficult for us to listen to it.

Preparing a way for the Lord means realising whether or not it is still possibile for us to find a way out of the ruts we ourselves have dug in the social, cultural, political and religious contexts in which we live and which risk becoming deeper and deeper. The Lord’s voice encourages us to imagine and desire a better future for the planet we inhabit and subsequently for the quality of our lives and of those of future generations.

In the first reading the prophet Baruch invites Jerusalem to take off the dress of sorrow and distress and “put on the beauty of the glory of God”. It is beauty “that will save the world,” writes Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel The Idiot, attributing the words to the main character, Prince Myskin. Bold and paradoxical as they may sound, they are words that call for reflection.

In today’s wilderness beauty is heavily contrasted with the violence of terrorism and corruption, with the basics of human dignity systematically denied to myriads of people around the globe.

In his Letter to Artists, Pope John Paul II had rightly written: “People of today and tomorrow need the enthusiasm of wonder if they are to meet and master the crucial challenges which stand before us. Thanks to this enthusiasm, hu­manity, every time it loses its way, will be able to lift itself up and set out again on the right path”.

At this juncture of history it is from here that the Church needs to pick up, before it comes to proclaim the good tidings of another Christmas. If we as believers are not ready to face reality as it is, and let God’s Word address us in this wilderness, we risk seriously devoiding the very message of Christmas.

It makes no sense to proclaim the coming or the advent of a saviour who does not save, who leaves things as they are and as they have always been. We’ve been repeating ad nauseam since the tragic events of 9/11 that much needs to change in the way we live and see things. As a whole we did next to nothing, except constantly face the consequences of our indecision.

Referring to the Paris summit on climate change, Pope Francis was right to claim that the inaction on the issue up to now is approaching global suicide. “We are at the limit,” he said, echoing in some sense John the Baptist’s voice in the wilderness calling on us all to put things right.

Christmas stands for God’s irruption in history to change the course of reality. Today we are being called, against all the alienating factors that immunise our systems, to make that irruption possible again.

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