The Reason for our hope: Homily for Sunday, December 10, 2023

Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.

Today we celebrate Saint Ambrose. Saint Ambrose was not only a great thinker, theologian and bishop, but he was also the teacher of Saint Augustine, leading him to the faith.

The reason for our hope

If you belong to a gym, you see the traditional pattern of who is present. If it’s shortly after the first of the year, the gym is crowded. Everybody is there because this is going to be the year that they finally get into shape. Of course, we can probably predict what’s going to happen.

It’s very full in the first week of January, not quite as full by the third week of January. And by the time we get to February, things are pretty much back to normal. And that’s really the story of our life in so many ways, isn’t it? We sometimes have good intentions, but not always perseverance in those intentions.

And the liturgical season of the year recognizes this because every year we kind of get the opportunity to hit the reset button. Advent is the beginning of the church year, and so in many ways we started last week by saying Happy New Year, because it is the new year that we recognize in grace the ways in which Jesus is present in our lives.

And today’s readings really help us to focus on what enables us to persevere, because things are not always easy. It is, in fact, quite difficult sometimes. The road, as we hear in Isaiah, can be rocky, filled with potholes and making it difficult to travel from one place to another in terms of growth. We can find in our lives that as much as we want to become better in this particular area or that, we just can’t seem to put it together.

Today’s readings remind us of the very good news that really it’s not up to us. It’s not really about working harder and harder and harder. It’s about really opening our heart more and more to the help that Jesus gives us to do what we should do. Opening our hearts more and more to becoming the person that Jesus has made us to be. That’s the good news.

As we look around, we hardly can—let me rephrase this. As we look around, it can be easy to believe that we’re not in a world of good news, because there are so many things that are not good all around us. I can’t keep track of all of the places in the world where there’s violence, where there’s war. There’s just too many of them. We simply haven’t figured out how to live together in peace.

I know that this time of year for some can be a very difficult time of year. While certainly it is true that this time of year can be exciting and wonderful and tremendous, it can be a time of year where, in fact, we recognize the gifts that we have and the blessings that we have. For others, it can be a time of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. It can hardly feel like the good news is what we are preparing for.

But Isaiah and the Gospel help us to remember that in the midst of it all, God has this amazing plan for us. It is the plan of salvation. If we read the history of the Bible, the parts that are, in fact, history, we see that it is not simply the recounting of events. It is the recounting of the ways in which God has been active in history to help us to experience the salvation He desires to give us.

In Isaiah’s first reading, the promises are amazing. It’s why, in so many ways, Isaiah is the prophet of Advent, because he reminds us of the great hope to which we are called. He starts with something that I mentioned to the kids not too long ago, with comfort. Because, quite frankly, in the midst of this horrible and terrible world, we need to be reminded that we’re not alone. That while things can seem to be bad, God is more powerful.

And so Isaiah reminds the people who have gone astray that they have the opportunity to come back because of what God is going to do in their lives. The Gospel reinforces this idea that the Bible is really about the history of our salvation.

This is the year of Mark’s Gospel. So, over the course of this next year, every weekend, we’re going to hear from Mark’s Gospel, with some exceptions. Mark is believed to have been the secretary, so to speak, of St. Peter. He may also have been the same John Mark that is mentioned as accompanying St. Paul. And if the date of his Gospel is accurate, he writes it shortly after the martyrdom of both St. Peter and St. Paul.

And so he’s telling a story that in many ways doesn’t have a lot of time to waste. Things seem to be pretty bad. Peter’s been killed. Paul’s been killed. Christians are persecuted. There was people who spent time in jail and all that kind of thing.

And so when we read Mark’s Gospel, there’s this sense of urgency that the gift of salvation must be accepted right now and here. And so there’s not a lot of wasted space. You’ll hear this in Mark’s Gospel when we read it. He loves the Word immediately. Jesus never does things in kind of a lackluster way. Immediately Jesus does this. Immediately Jesus does that. Immediately they go here. There is this profound sense of urgency.

And so Mark doesn’t have the story of the nativity. There’s no Christmas story in the Gospel of Mark. He starts with a simple fact which explains everything that he’s going to write. Here begins the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He’s telling us right from the beginning that this is a story about the divine Son of God.

We’re not hoping to come to faith over the course of reading this Gospel. It’s presumed right at the very beginning. And underscoring this idea that the Gospel is really about a biblical worldview, we see John.

Now we learn in other spots that John is often stated to be Elijah. He’s in the Jordan River where the people of God were sent into the Promised Land. And so the Jordan remains a critical and important place because it’s ultimately where Jesus is going to bring us into the Promised Land by being baptized first by John and by his life, death, and resurrection. His food is grasshoppers and wild honey.

Think again of the book of Exodus where there were locusts and wild honey. There was going to be suffering. That’s locusts. You don’t want locusts to come. They don’t come by themselves. They all go out together. But honey and milk was considered a real luxury.

And so if the land was flowing with honey, then the chosen land is better than we could possibly imagine. And so, you know, John the Baptist is saying, your life right now may not be so good, but the promise of God is tremendous indeed. And that’s what we celebrate every time we come to this church. We have an opportunity to encounter the divine in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Mass has typically been understood as the meeting of heaven and earth. That we get a little glimpse of what heaven is like every time we come to Mass because Jesus is fully, completely, totally, and entirely present in the Blessed Sacrament. By the Eucharist we receive, we are called to become more and more the body of Christ in the way we live our lives.

When we are baptized, it is the Lord Jesus who sends his divine life into us and gives us a vocation to share that divine life with everyone we meet. We may find ourselves sinful and falling short in our desires and our lives, but it is here that we encounter in an act of worship the Lord Jesus in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where we are reconciled both to God and to one another, which is in fact why Catholics believe that the Sacrament of Reconciliation was a gift given by Jesus.

Our sinfulness affects not only us, and not only does it impact our personal relationship with God, but it impacts our relationship with each other as well. Let us ask the Lord today to help us to recognize that the promise held out before us is great indeed, and that if we open our hearts to the presence of God, he will save us.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.

About Author