VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS

REFLECTIONS FOR THE SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT (05 DECEMBER 2022)

" A voice of one crying out in the desert, Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths" (Matthew 3:3)

Voices from the wilderness do not always reach our pulpits, parliaments, or prime-time media debates. However, these counter-cultural calls for resistance, cries for conversion, and struggles for justice and peace endure the test of our indifference. Feeble yet persistent voices that God raises through his prophets continue to challenge our individual and collective consciences, families, Church, and society. Fr. Alfred Delp was one such persistent voice that withstood the noise of a violent dictatorship. He served as co-editor of the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit (Voices of the Times) until its suppression by the Nazis in 1941.

Fr. Delp then joined the Kreisau Circle, a group of 25 men and women dedicated to non-violent civil resistance against the totalitarian regime of his time. Following his wrongful arrest for plotting to assassinate Hitler in 1944, Fr. Delp was executed by the Gestapo and his ashes were disposed of discreetly at the führer’s personal command.

1. The messenger’s ‘wildness’:

Matthew describes John the Baptist as a man out there in the wilderness, clothed in camel’s hair and living on a bizarre diet of locusts and wild honey. The prophet doesn’t seem to care about political correctness, social etiquette, impressing his audience, or public popularity. Here is a ‘feral’ man of God bent on breaking the 400 years of prophetic silence that had existed since Malachi to his day. God’s prophet is here and he declares, “Make straight, prepare, and repent for here is the winnowing fan and the unquenchable fire!

2. The message’s ‘radicality’:

The ‘wildness’ of the setting and the prophet’s appearance, language and lifestyle are literary tools that Matthew employs to set the stage for the ‘radical’ voice of the prophet. John opens his address to the Pharisees and the Sadducees calling them “a brood of vipers”! He shakes the sense of security that they assumed by virtue of the fact that they were children of Abraham. He compares them to trees that do not produce fruit and to chaff that are destined to be burnt. His message is urgent, radical, and straightforward: “now the axe lies at the root of the trees”. It is not about partial or corrective pruning of the branches anymore. The axe is laid to the root and here is the moment of judgement!

3. Our ‘resistance’ to change:

The shocking wildness of the messenger and the radicality of his message challenges the audience to change. Luke’s version of the gospel records the crowds, soldiers, and tax collectors asking John the same question: “what should we do?”. God’s message and messenger aim at inviting us to renewal as symbolised in John’s baptism of repentance. His offer of baptism was an invitation to recognise our sins, our desire for spiritual cleansing, and our commitment to follow God’s law in anticipation of the Messiah’s arrival. Heeding God’s radical voice obliges us to pro-actively subject ourselves to the difficult process of change, conversion, transformation, and renewal. The truth indeed liberates us (John 8:32) but it has to hurt us first, mould us, and renew us.

Beware! The voices from the wilderness are characteristically different from the voices of the “prophets of doom”, who, as Pope John XXIII warned at the opening of Vatican II in 1962, “are always forecasting disaster in the world and in the future of the Church". Prophetism of doom is pessimistic, deconstructive, and aimed at creating anarchy. The voices from the wilderness, on the other hand, are voices of hope that call for positive and constructive change. “Whatever was written previously was written for our instruction, that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope” affirms Paul in the second reading. God raises voices from the wilderness to help us materialise the dream of Isaiah in the first reading: creating a world of justice, peace, non-violence, and inclusivism. Let the voices from the wilderness break into our ears and hearts!