DOMINICA II ADVENTUS
6 DECEMBER 2015
TU ES?
'ARE YOU THE ONE?" is a question the answer to which must change your life forever. When John the Baptist asked it from his prison cell, he already knew the answer. He had known his Lord from the womb and had proclaimed the arrival of Lamb of God before he baptised Him. His question was not for his own enlightenment, rather it was a prayer of the most profound supplication, for his times to draw to a close and for the Lord’s to begin. It is as if he petitions the Lord, ‘Show yourself to be the Christ’ in a final act of the most profound faith; the final act of preparing the way for the Lord, before he surrendered himself to his fate and to his God, in complete trust that his reason for living had been accomplished and that he could depart in peace. After this episode, we hear nothing of the Baptist until his beheading. It is exactly as he would have had it; his prayer answered: his voice fading without his testimony diminishing; his mission accomplished as Christ’s blossomed onto the world stage.
And what a prophetic prayer this is for our own times, for if we truly believe that Jesus Christ is The One who is to come, then we must also beseech him from the prison cells of our lives, to show himself to be the Christ in the wilderness of our world today. May we and our desires for ourselves diminish as His will abounds. May these times of man’s corrupt rule over himself give way to the sovereignty of Christ. And may He arise as we bear our own humble witness to His Kingdom, as did the Baptist: voices in the wilderness, calling all to know what has been revealed to us in the intimacy of our encounter with Christ, which has made us leap with joy as John in the womb.
Pray, then, in earnest, that we to whom so much has been given in Christ, may be given His strength in abundance for the days ahead. For these are days not of idle waiting but of active anticipation; of heralding His coming; of making straight in the desert a highway for our God (Is. 40:3). For in our faith that Christ is The One, we shall no longer sleep, but we shall be changed forever, until, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet: the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor. 15:51-52). Unto that day, then, may our voices, like the voice of John the Baptist confessor par excellence, be heard by the hearts of men, so that in the day of His coming they may be forgotten in the glory of His return, as our voices mingle with the angels before Him, and with all the saints who, with their lives, have filled the valleys with the praise of our God and made low the mountains and hills of human pride and imperiousness.
Tu es qui venturus es, an alium exspectamus? Dicite Joanni quae vidistis:
Ad lumen redeunt caeci, mortui resurgunt, pauperes evangelizantur, alleluia.
Antiphona Magnificat, ad Vesperas Dominica II Adventus
Art thou he that art to come or look we for another? Go and relate to John what you have seen:
the blind see, the dead rise again, to the poor the gospel is preached. Alleluia.