Sermon by Father Alex McAllister SDS     Index

Second Sunday of Advent, Year A—2004 Homily

I read a short article in that excellent Catholic periodical The Tablet about the decline in religious Advent Calendars. Somebody had gone around the various card shops and noted down the numbers of secular and religious Advent Calendars. I’m sure you can guess that the vast majority were secular in their orientation.

To me this is a complete contradiction. How on earth can you have an Advent Calendar which does not make reference to the various events that led up to Christ’s birth?

But then I suppose that a Christmas card with secular images is just as much of a contradiction and yet we see them everywhere.

You can be sure that we are selling only religious Advent Calendars in our repository at the back of the church.

There is another wonderful old tradition for Advent that you don’t see very much these days and that is the Jesse Tree. The origin of it is the text of our beautiful first reading today: A shoot springs from the stock of Jesse.

You might have seen a Jesse Tree in one of those beautiful stained glass windows in mediaeval churches. It has Jesse lying there with a tree growing from his side and on the branches of the tree are images of the important characters in the lineage that leads eventually to Jesus. Jesse was the father of King David and we know that Jesus comes from the line of David.

These Jesse Trees don’t always stay strictly to the actual lineage of Jesus, often they show Kings of Judah or various of the prophets who foretold Christ’s birth. Usually they end up with Jesus and Mary at the top.

Children often make their own Jesse Tree during Advent and it is a useful and creative activity for them at this time of the year. They take a bare branch and decorate it perhaps by painting it gold or silver. Then the children hang from the Jesse Tree symbols from the Old Testament they have drawn or painted. It is a good learning experience both for children and parents. Each week some new ones can be added.

Some of the symbols that can be hung from a Jesse Tree include Joseph’s coat of many colours, Noah’s ark, the rainbow, a dove, the burning bush, Jacob’s ladder, a ram to represent Isaac, Adam and Eve, a whale for Jonah, David’s harp, water to represent John the Baptist, the angel who visited Mary, and so on. There’s certainly plenty of room for creativity and story telling.

These stories from the Old Testament need to be told again and again; they are not only part of our faith they are an important aspect of our culture.

This is why members from all the Churches in Thornbury are participating in Open the Book—a scheme which involves small groups visiting each primary school on a weekly basis and acting out the stories of the Bible. The children enjoy them very much and as each year passes they become more and more familiar with the Bible.

One of the most important personages to be commemorated on the Jesse Tree is surely John the Baptist, the immediate forerunner to Christ.

Matthew paints a picture of him as a man with a mission, a very determined and no nonsense person. He certainly does not tolerate the hypocrisy of the Pharisees or Sadducees and his confrontation with them is expressed in fairly strong language. It is clear that he does not believe them to be sincere.

However, John’s message is accepted, in all humility, by the many ordinary people who come for his baptism of repentance. They admit their own need for forgiveness and conversion of life. John’s challenging preaching has caused them to reflect and to want to introduce change to their lives..

The people instinctively recognise John as a prophet. But for this strong and strict man to be proclaiming that he was merely the forerunner of someone even greater and more powerful must have made them wonder what was coming.

John portrays the coming of Christ as a cataclysmic event and yet when Christ comes he does so in a quiet ordinary way. He comes as a gentle and healing Saviour not as a threatening judge.

This is not a mistake that John has made, because the consequences of Christ’s coming are of decisive importance for the world. It is a time for decisions to be made, the choices it involves are indeed of great significance and the results of making the wrong choice are devastating.

John is a forerunner. He is proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, the one so long foretold, the one who was to save Israel. Each dedicated follower of Christ in the world today ought to see something of John the Baptist in themselves because we have a similar role. It is our task to proclaim the coming of Christ to the people we live among.

This is a task we ought to take seriously. I don’t mean that we should wear camel hair and eat locusts and wild honey. Nor do I mean that we should be prophets of doom haranguing the people around us.

We might have to find different ways to proclaim it, but our message should be essentially the same as John’s: The Kingdom is coming and if anyone wants to enter the Kingdom of God then they must surely repent of their sins.

Part of the problem in our society is that people do not know the difference between good and evil: euthanasia is described in terms of a dignified death; the main problem with abortion seems to be who will pay for it; government ministers commit adultery and it is described as a private matter; vast amounts of taxpayers money are wasted on ineffective Quangos and the poor in the Third World are allowed to starve to death. I could go on and on.

It is our job to clearly proclaim the right values and to help others to make good moral decisions.

But then there are our own little hypocrisies, deceits and self-delusions; you can list your own for yourself. Each one of us finds our own subtle ways to blur the difference between good and evil. What would John the Baptist make of us all?

He would certainly invite us to repent. And this is something we Catholics are, thankfully, fairly comfortable with. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is an important part of our lives and we will have an additional opportunity to celebrate it at our Advent Penitential Service on Friday 17th December when several priests will be present.

By making frequent use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation we become more and more aware of the mercy of God, we become more and more aware of our role as ministers of reconciliation in the world in which we live. The people of today need us to exercise this ministry more than ever before.

We don’t do this by going round condemning everyone, but by exercising the virtues of mercy and compassion. The more we are aware of our own need for mercy the more likely we are to mediate it to those around us.