2nd Sunday of Advent, Year A
First Reading: Isa 11:1-10
Second Reading: Rom 15:4-9
Gospel Reading: Mt 3:1-12
“Repent,” John the Baptist warns in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, referring to “the wrath to come.” He says God “will gather the wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
(In wheat, the chaff is the husk surrounding the seed. The seed is what we eat; the chaff is thrown away.)
As Christians, we are so imbued with a sense of God’s mercy that we tend to forget his justice. However, Jesus himself, who said he had come to save the world, not to condemn it, spoke of God’s judgment.
The wrath of God against sin, and his righteous judgement of sinners, are important biblical principles. Until we understand them, we cannot appreciate God’s love, displayed in Christ’s cross. God cannot pretend that evil is good, nor ignore our practice of evil, for “he who is, is truth and love,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
God’s love for us “is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice,” Pope Benedict XVI said in his first encyclical.
“So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man” – in the Person of Jesus Christ – “he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.”
Not until Christ’s crucifixion can we understand how two opposing qualities can be reconciled: how a holy God can make sinners right with himself without leaving sin unjustly unpunished.
Nevertheless, God hates evil. That is why the Church encourages us to repent: “Prepare the way of the Lord!” Advent is the time to do penance and amend our lives.
In particular, there are two sins about which we should examine our consciences, for they are becoming more common, whether or not we are aware of them.
One is pornography, especially internet pornography. Pornography “offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offence” against God.
The other is New Age practices: astrology, horoscopes, Ouija boards, tarot cards, charms, clairvoyance, certain forms of yoga, and consulting fortune tellers, palm readers, mediums, psychic readers, etc.
Even in the Old Testament, when God spoke “to our fathers by the prophets,” he strictly forbade such “abominations.” Because of them, he drove out the original inhabitants of the Promised Land. Israelites who practised them were put to death.
Now, in the New Testament, God has spoken to us by his Son. In him, God said everything at once, and “he has no more to say.” Therefore, anyone now desiring something more “would be guilty not only of foolish behaviour, but also of offending him, by not fixing his eyes entirely upon Christ and by living with the desire for some other novelty.”
That is the appeal of New Age – “some other novelty,” some alternative to the Catholic Church.
“It is not possible to isolate some elements of New Age religiosity as acceptable to Christians, while rejecting others,” says the Vatican’s document on the New Age movement. The Catechism says “it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained.”
Nevertheless, “idolatry remains a constant temptation.” People whose understanding of the faith is weak “mistakenly hold that the Christian religion does not inspire a profound spirituality, and so they seek elsewhere,” says the Vatican document.
As an “alternative,” New Age offers “ancient Egyptian occult practices, Cabbalism, early Christian gnosticism, Sufism, the lore of the Druids, Celtic Christianity, medieval alchemy, Renaissance hermeticism, Zen Buddhism, Yoga, and so on.”
But “life in Christ” comes from “the sacramental life of the Church.”
