GOSPEL, FIRST READING & PSALM TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
...this was a time of evil leaders, of corrupt governors, of corrupt and even evil priests working in the Temple, you know, leading the Jewish people as well. And into that corruption and into that scene comes John the Baptist, the son of the righteous priest Zechariah, with a message of good news that the Messiah is coming and that salvation is at hand, right. So it’s just a powerful, powerful portrait of the time when John the Baptist arose on the scene. Sometime around 29 or 30 A.D. John comes onto the scene and this is what happens. He goes out into the desert, he goes out into the wilderness, and he begins preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Now there are lots of things we could say about John, whole books have been written about him. For our purposes here I just want to highlight one element: the geography of John's ministry. Why does John go out into the wilderness? Why does he go into the River Jordan to preach this baptism of repentance? Why not go to Jerusalem? I mean if you want to get crowds of people, if you want to get attention, if you want to call more people to repentance, don’t you go to the city? Why do you go to the wilderness or the desert? The answer to that question is found in the quotation from the Book of Isaiah that Luke gives you here. This is a quotation of a prophecy of the new exodus, when God is going to save his people in the future like he saved them in the past. He’s going to make a way through the desert and lead them home to the promised land in ways similar to the path through the desert that he made at the time of Moses and the Exodus, where he led the peo- ple out of Egypt through the desert and then to the river Jordan. And if you're fa- miliar with the Book of Joshua, you’ll recall that in Joshua 4 & 5 it says that the first exodus from Egypt came to an end when Joshua and the 12 tribes passed through the waters of the river Jordan and entered into the earthly promised land of Canaan. So what Isaiah says in this oracle is that in the future there's going to be a new exodus. That's one of the categories that they describe the future age of salvation with as a new exodus. So John the Baptist as the prophet of the age of salvation is also a prophet of the new exodus, a prophet of the new way of salvation that God is going to make with the coming of the Messiah, right, that Isaiah had spoken about in his oracles.
Now every time I talk about this topic it's so tempting to just open up this giant can of worms because this is what I wrote my dissertation about, it's a topic that’s very near and dear to my heart, and I think it's one that really helps us get into Advent in particular. But for reasons of space and time let me just make one quick point here about the new exodus, you know, what is this new exodus? Well there are two images that get used for it in the Old Testament. One is making the way through the desert like we see here in the book of the prophet Isaiah. You know, God carving a path to the promised land just like he had done at the time of Moses. But there's another image that gets used for the new exodus in the Old Testament and its the image of the ingathering of the exiles, right. So in the First Century A.D., although people don’t often think about this, the Jewish people had a problem. The problem was that over the centuries, the majority of the 12 tribes of Israel had been scattered to the four winds.
So for example, in the Eighth Century B.C. the Assyrian Empire came in and exiled 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel in what was called the Assyrian exile; it happened in 722 B.C. And then a couple centuries later the Babylonians came in and they exiled the remaining two tribes of Judah and Benjamin. They brought them to Babylon in 587 B.C. in what was known as the Babylonian exile. Every First Century Jew would've known that the Babylonian exile, the second exile, came to an end in the Fifth Century B.C. whenever the Persians allowed the Jews, the Judahites and the Benjaminites, to come back and rebuild the Temple and rebuild the city of Jerusalem. That was the end of the Babylonian exile, but every First Century Jew would've also known that the Assyrian exile, the 10 northern tribes who'd been scattered amongst the Gentiles, had never come home. This was the origin of the legend of the lost 10 tribes of Israel. The idea that these 10 tribes remain scattered and mixed amongst the Gentiles, but that one day when the Messiah came those lost tribes of Israel would actually return to the promised land in the ingathering of the exiles, which is described by some of the prophets as the new exodus. So the new exodus is really the gathering in of those lost tribes of Israel.
All of that background is really essential for understanding the first reading today. So just like the reading from the gospel was about the new exodus, the reading from the Old Testament today is about the ingathering of the exiles. So if you turn with me, the Old Testament reading for the Second Sunday of Advent is from a book that’s only in the Catholic Old Testament, it's the little-known Book of Baruch. So if you look at the Old Testament, Baruch was the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah. He would've lived in the Sixth Century before Christ, and there's a little book that is often circulated as an appendix to the Book of Jeremiah called the Book of Baruch. In chapter 5, verses 1-9, Baruch gives a prophecy of the new exo- dus, it’s a prophecy of the ingathering of all the scattered children of Israel. In this prophecy he depicts the ingathering as children coming home to their mother with Jerusalem being depicted as a mother waiting for her children to come home. So this is, it's a beautiful prophecy, this is what it says:
Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on for ever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting. For God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven. For your name will for ever be called by God, “Peace of righteousness and glory of godliness.” Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height and look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east, at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For they went forth from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne. For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God's command. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Alright, so notice something about that prophecy. Baruch says to Jerusalem look up, lift up your eyes, arise and see your children coming home not just from the east but from the west. Now that doesn't just mean every direction, it also means the ingathering of the Assyrian exiles, the ingathering of all the tribes of Israel, be- cause the Babylonian exile only went east, it didn’t go west, it went to the east. But the Assyrians actually scattered the children of Israel all over the place: north, south, east, and west. So what Baruch is describing there is the time of the Messiah, when there was this belief that all 12 tribes, not just two, all 12 tribes would be gathered together again and brought to a new Jerusalem, a more glorious Jerusalem, and a new temple that would be greater even than the Temple of Solomon; a Jerusalem that would be greater than the Jerusalem of Solomon, right, that would put on the robe of righteousness and wear this diadem of God’s glory.
That's what John the Baptist is announcing in the wilderness. That's what John the Baptist goes out to the river Jordan to proclaim, and that's why John the Baptist was so popular amongst the Jews of his day, because he was saying to them the time of the ingathering of the exiles is at hand, and in order to get ready for the coming of the Messiah you need to put away your sins; you need to turn away from a life of sin and turn to a life of grace, repentance for the forgiveness of sins. That's the condition that makes Israel ready to meet her Messiah, because at the end of the day remember, what was it that led Israel into exile, what scattered them amongst the nations? It was sin. It's sin that exiles us from God. It’s sin that separates us from God. It’s sin that, in a sense, drives us away from the promised land that God made to be our home, and so what John’s doing is saying to the peo- ple if you repent, the age of salvation will come and people will be able to come home and the new Exodus will take place, the ingathering of the exiles, and God’s going to make a new way in the desert and bring his children home.
Alright, and if you have any doubt that that's the case, think about what happens after John's ministry. Jesus comes on to the scene, what’s the first thing he does? How many apostles does he gather around him? Not one, not two, not three, not 10, but 12, showing that he is going to bring about the ingathering of the 12 tribes. Not by an earthly return to the earthly promised land, Jesus doesn’t send his men out and say bring every Israelite you find amongst the Gentiles back to the earthly Jerusalem and the earthly temple, no, no, no, this is going to be a new Jerusalem, it’s going to be a new temple. It’s going to be a new ingathering of the exiles to a new Jerusalem. That explains the Responsorial Psalm for today.
SECOND READING TRANSCRIPT (Subscribe or Login for Full Transcript):
Okay, so now with that said, there’s one aspect of this reading from Philippians chapter 1 that is really theologically significant, and I’d like to kind of reflect on for just a minute. Because you might be thinking, “Alright Dr. Pitre. I want to prepare for the second coming or I want to prepare for the judgment, of my particular judgment at the end of my life. But as I look at my life, it makes me a little nervous, as I see my own history of sin, as I see my own (and continue to experience my own) human weakness, it actually makes me scared of the idea of the final judgment. It makes me afraid of the second coming.”
And it is fascinating to me that whereas ancient Christians often look forward to the second coming of Christ with joy and expectation and eagerness and hope, it’s often the case that many modern Christians will talk about the second coming as if it’s something to be afraid of or if it’s something to be fearful about or anxious about, often because (to be fair)... because of the fact that the New Testament says a great tribulation will precede it. So we understand that, but at the same time, Paul in his letters always talks about the
parousia with joy and hope and eager anticipation.
So people might say, “How can I prepare for the second advent with any kind of confidence when I’m such a sinful and weak person?” And Paul gives us a clue here in the opening verses of the passage for today that really is important for us to remember. He says this, in verse 6 he says:
And I am sure that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
What does that mean? Well, here Paul is encouraging the Philippians to approach the day of the Lord, the day of judgment, with confidence, because the good work that has begun in them — the work of their conversion, the work of their growth in holiness, the work of their growth in charity — at the end of the day, is the work of Christ Himself. It’s the work of Christ dwelling in them that is going to bear the fruit of righteousness that he mentions at the end of the passage.
So you can already see Paul, in a sense, cutting off with the past the later error that would be known as the heresy of Pelagianism — that we will earn the gift of salvation, that a human
can earn the gift of salvation through their own merits, apart from the work of grace, apart from the work of Christ. And Paul is absolutely opposed to such an idea, and you can see here that he conceptualizes any good work that the Philippians might have done as actually Christ working in them. So because of that, he says, “I’m confident that the person who began a good work in you through His grace is going to bring that work to completion on the day of the Lord”.
So there’s no reason to be afraid of the final judgment. If Christ is dwelling in us, if Christ is actually working in us, then it’s He who is going to bear those fruits of righteousness. We don't do it on our own. We’re not doing it on our own power. We are born by His grace.
So Paul has a very robust theology of grace — you’ll see it throughout his letters. But I do think that this is a key passage, precisely because (as you may recall) in the 16th century at the time of the Protestant Reformation, figures such as Martin Luther, for example, are going to read Paul’s letter to the Galatians 2, where he says:
… yet who knows that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ … (Galatians 2:16a)
And Luther’s going to read that expression “works of the law” as a way of referring to good works or good deeds. And he’s going to see Paul as polemicizing against good works and the idea that good works play any role in our righteousness, in our justification. I could go into… it’s too far a field right now for me to say what Paul is referring to there or to go into the whole issue of the context of Galatians and how he’s talking about circumcision when he’s referring to the “works of the law”, as well as other aspects of the old covenant law. But I won't go into that right now. You can check out… I have an essay and book called
Perspectives on Paul, where I lay out — oh, I’ve got it right here. Sorry, I don’t usually do that, but I’ll grab it.
So this book called
Perspectives on Paul, I have an essay in here called the Roman Catholic Perspective on Paul, where I talk about works of the law and the relationship between them and good works and a whole essay on how that’s been interpreted over the history of the Catholic tradition. So check that out if you want to look at that.
But what’s interesting is, in Galatians, Paul
doesn’t use the expression “good works”. He uses “works of the law”, which can be used as a technical term for circumcision and Sabbath and food laws and things like that that were particular to Judaism.
But here he
does use the expression “good work”. He uses — the Greek is
ergon agathon, literally a… an
ergon is a work and
agathon is the adjective for good. So
ergon agathon is a good work. But when Paul uses… when he actually uses the expression “good work”, is he critiquing it? No. Is he talking about it in a pelagian sense, as if it’s something we do on our own? No. What he says is...
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