I had said last weekend that Advent is both remembering the preparations for the First Coming of Christ in Bethlehem and the preparations for the Second Coming of Christ in glory, on the clouds of heaven, with angelic assistants, etc. I had suggested that our vigil for the Second Coming could take example from the vigil of the Jewish people for their Messiah, more than two thousand years ago and more. The first reading this weekend is about the glorification of Jerusalem, which takes place in Christ and His Church.
“Enough, Jerusalem; lay aside now the sad garb of thy humiliation, and put on bright robes, befitting the eternal glory God means for thee; cloak of divine protection thrown about thee, thy temples bearing a diadem of renown. In thee God will manifest the splendour of His presence, for the whole world to see; and the name by which He will call thee for ever is, Loyalty rewarded, Piety crowned. Up, Jerusalem, to the heights! Look to the sun’s rising, and see if thy sons be not coming to thee, gathered from east to west, joyfully acknowledging God’s holy will! Afoot they were led off by the enemy; it is the Lord that shall lead them home, borne aloft like royal princes. He will have the ground made level; high mountain must stoop, and immemorial hill, and the valleys be filled up, for Israel’s safe passage and God’s glory; spinneys of every scented tree shall grow, by His divine command, to give Israel shade. So merciful He is, and so faithful! In great content, their journey lit by the majesty of His presence, Israel shall come home.”
Prophecy of Baruch, 5: 1-9 [link]
The prophet Baruch was a scribe working alongside the prophet Jeremiah, the both more often than not thinking with one mind, and Baruch acting as Jeremiah’s spokesman when Jeremiah was imprisoned or otherwise unable to function as prophet. The prophets usually saw Jerusalem the Holy City as dressed by God in glorious vestment, prepared as a bride for her Husband, Who is God. The vestment assumes an integrity and a purity, especially from idolatry, and God honours that purity and dresses the pure one – here Jerusalem – with glory. When the people fell into sin and idolatry, they lost their purity. When they pretended to serve God in holiness while they were fallen deep into vice and the degradation of sin, they lost their integrity.
Jerusalem in this reading represents the people of God. God had made the Hebrew people glorious and a sign to every other nation of the earth, and they had failed to be faithful as a nation, and been humiliated in their pride by the great powers of the time, the Assyrians and the Babylonians. The prophet is here calling the people to repentance and atonement with God. Arise, he says, stand upon the heights, take up your mantle of purity once more and the splendour that God once gave you and which is yours.
Baruch and Jeremiah lived through two successive exiles of the Jewish people from Jerusalem and Judah to Mesopotamia and other countries. Writing now, in the period between the first exile and the destruction of Jerusalem and the second exile, Baruch is calling upon the people to return to God, and if they do, the captives of the first exile would be returned. A beautiful hope, especially when we know that the people did not repent, and there was a second exile after the City was destroyed. Bondage came, the Jewish kingdom was destroyed.
But Jerusalem would be glorified as the dazzling bride of the Holy One, in mercy and integrity, centuries later. And the beginning of that glorification is what we honour particularly this weekend. For the eighth day of December is the day Catholics remember the Immaculate Conception, when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in the womb of her mother S. Anna. The bishops have delayed the liturgical observance to Monday, to preserve the second Sunday of Advent, but Sunday is still the calendar day. The significance of this conception of Our Lady should be obvious to us, in so far as we human beings in a very real way are our parents, in that we take our humanity and our human traits materially from them.
And when God decided that He would be a man, and that He would be born of a Virgin, He proposed to take His humanity materially from this beautiful woman, the purest of all created things, conceived without sin – as we Latins say, conceived immaculate – sine macula, without stain of sin. In the Blessed Virgin Mary at the moment of her conception in the womb of S. Anna mercy and integrity begin to return to the human race in this daughter of Adam, and we are left to marvel at the miracle. In the words of the psalm, When God finally delivered Sion or Jerusalem – the Hebrew nation – from bondage to sin – in Mary – He had finally prepared all things for the glorification of Jerusalem that was to follow, in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. What a marvel the Lord worked for the Hebrew nation!
“It was in the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius’ reign, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea, when Herod was prince in Galilee, his brother Philip in the Ituraean and Trachonitid region, and Lysanias in Abilina, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiphas, that the word of God came upon John, the son of Zachary, in the desert. And he went all over the country round Jordan, announcing a baptism whereby men repented, to have their sins forgiven, as it is written in the book of the sayings of the prophet Isaias, ‘There is a voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten out his paths. Every valley is to be bridged, and every mountain and hill levelled, and the windings are to be cut straight, and the rough paths made into smooth roads, and all mankind is to see the saving power of God.'”
Gospel of S. Luke, 3: 1-6 [link]
The link of our gospel story to Baruch’s prophecy is clearly in the levelling of mountains and filling in of valleys, in order to allow Jerusalem and Judah to be more quickly restored, as per Baruch. But S. John the Baptist has a greater vision: it isn’t only the Hebrew nation returning to God in the Messiah, but all nations of the earth – all mankind. But this reading also begins the ministry of S. John (and so of Christ), with as historical a circumstance as was possible to a writer from the first century (S. Luke, that is), naming the Roman emperor, the Roman governor of the Levant, the Jewish rulers in place, and the chief priests of the Temple in Jerusalem.
For God called His people historically in Moses, and built the Temple in Solomon, and now prepares to fulfil all the promises He had made long ago to Adam to finally remake/sanctify humanity, in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory and praise for all ages.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 