Today’s readings: Isaiah 11, 1-10; Romans 15, 4-9; Matthew 3, 1-12.

If the Bethlehem narrative fails to remind us of Aleppo and Mosul, of the millions of displaced people and of the orphaned children, of the abused women and of entire peoples still at war, then what we are celebrating this Christmas is a sham. We would be like the Pharisees and the Sadducees in today’s gospel who went to John the Baptist claiming “We have Abraham for our father” – meaning we have a legacy and you can bring no good news to us beyond that.

Faced with the hard facts that are the gloom and doom on our headlines, we need to situate today’s scriptures in our contexts to discern better the new meanings that God’s word can claim for itself in the here and now. On the first Sunday of Advent, the scriptures opened our eyes not to be alienated; today we have a basic question to answer: how can we face reality and keep hope alive.

We celebrate Christmas because we still believe there is hope in the midst of despair. With Christmas we proclaim the dawn of a new era because we still hold on to hope in spite of so much that kills hope. Reading St Paul’s letter to the Romans makes us acknowledge that temptations against hope are in no way 21st century stuff.

Paul writes: “Everything that was written long ago in the scriptures was meant to teach us something about hope.” And in the first reading Isaiah speaks of a root of Jesse that “shall stand as a signal to the peoples”. Hope is not a soft virtue projecting our faith onto life after death. Hope is a fundamental attitude of the spirit, it is a virtue that has a content conveyed to us in the voice of prophets like Isaiah and John the Baptist.

Our duty is not to let the proclamation of those voices end up being a cry in the wilderness, voices that remain unheard and spirits that remain inactive. Christian hope is transformative. It is not a dead legacy, it translates into justice. If we ‘spiritualise’ Christmas, talk about justice and peace will take us nowhere. It will only make the world more cynical about our narratives.

John the Baptist was furious with the Pharisees and the Sadducees who officially represented the religious system but who for him were people of the lie. Christmas cannot be celebrated with a clean conscience if we close our eyes and ears not to be disturbed by the cries of those who lack everything in life.

We cannot preach a God who loves humanity when humanity’s face is constantly distorted. How can we bridge the crude reality with what Christmas stands for? In Isaiah’s words, how can we keep hope alive and stand as signals of hope to the world around us? John’s cry to prepare the way for the Lord is not a call to prepare for the Christmas festivities.

God’s voice through the Baptist came after a long silence and it is calling for a change of heart. John the Baptist came after a long time of silence on the part of God with people losing hope for having waited too long. It was not at all easy to keep hope alive. Just as today it is not easy to speak of God’s love showered on humanity in Jesus Christ when so many are still excluded from that love.

Words like justice and peace may sound void of meaning in such contexts. The call to prepare a way for the Lord is an invitation to discern new ways how to make God’s voice heard in contexts that witness more His absence rather than His presence, our major challenge today being precisely to find God’s presence in His absence. How can we still stand out as a signal to the world around us? That is the question.

Isaiah writes: “His word is a rod that strikes the ruthless, His sentences brings death to the wicked.” There is a strong sense of justice in the words of both Isaiah and John the Baptist, making it clear that we cannot pretend not to see or hear and that we cannot approach Christmas unprepared.

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