Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent, B, Vigil
December 16, 2023
To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.17.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, when, like every Advent, for the second Sunday in a row, we encounter St. John the Baptist who proclaims to us, “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.” The Old Testament priests and Levites from Jerusalem who came the great distance downhill into the Jordan valley were engaging in a tense conversation with him trying to figure him out. “Who are you?,” they asked. John replied that he wasn’t the Messiah. He wasn’t Elijah come to life again. He wasn’t the Prophet Moses, the three figures Jews had been waiting for as a result of Old Testament prophecies. So they asked him again, “Who are you, so we can give an answer to those who sent us? What do you have to say for yourself?” That’s when John announced he was the forerunner of another, the voice of One calling all of us to conversion, of One who was coming after him who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and whose sandal strap he was not worthy to untie. Church tradition has always referred to John the Baptist as the precursor of the Lord, because as his father Zechariah said at his birth, he would “go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of sins.” The interrogation of the forerunner of the Lord is one that we do every Advent, as we focus, first, on his identity and divine mission and heed his summons to make straight the paths for the Lord’s coming; then, we ponder how we are interrogated about what who we are and what we have to say for ourselves, since each of us, like John, is meant to be a voice of Jesus the Word, announcing him to others and helping them clear the path for Jesus to come into their life.
* John the Baptist was a herald. In the ancient world, before X, Instagram and Facebook, before text messages and websites, before televisions and radios, before newspapers and posters, how would people be informed that a dignitary was coming to their town? Heralds would be sent out to alert everyone, to call them to attention, so that the one coming might be expected and desired, so that they could repair the roads and the bridges or build new ones, so that they could clean everything up, and so that the people could notice and greet the one who was coming when he arrived. This is the service that John the Baptist fulfilled for the Lord’s coming 2000 years ago and the Church has him do for us every Advent.
* As Catholics, however, we’re called not merely to receive and be grateful for the work of the Lord’s forerunner, but we’re also called to imitate him in becoming precursors in our own right. Jesus constantly has need of heralds to announce his existence, his coming, his kingdom, and his presence as God-with-us. All of us, by our baptism and strengthened by our confirmation, have been consecrated to carry out this role. Jesus went to John and sanctified him from the beginning in the womb of his mother Saint Elizabeth. The same Lord has chosen us, redeemed us and sanctified us at the beginning of our lives in the womb of our mother, the Church, (which is the baptismal font), so that we might be his witnesses in the world, so that we might smooth out his paths and prepare others for his coming. We are called,
