PREPARE A WAY

 

PREPARE A WAY

I met a man this week who had never heard of The Beatles. There was an event in a hotel in Harare where the band played one of their songs, Let it be, and it brought a rush of nostalgia to the likes of me. It struck me how short our memories are. The majority of people in this country have no experience of the songs of the sixties or of life in Rhodesia and seemingly most don’t even ask what it was like.

A book on the history of South Africa, by Leonard Thompson, opens with the statement: ‘Modern Western Culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past … People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance.’

How different the Israel/Palestine situation might be if leaders there paid attention to history.

If we are ignorant of the past, we can be even more so of the future. Yet Scripture plies us with reminders of what will happen even if it does so in poetic language which both hides – and reveals – the future: ‘The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all humankind shall see it. …Go up on a high mountain …Shout with a loud voice … Here is the Lord coming with power, his arm subduing all things. The prize of his victory is with him …’

The message is one of extraordinary joy, consolation and comfort. This is the first message of what the Church calls Advent, the season of ‘Coming’. The second message, the one John the Baptiser was so forceful about, is preparation. The coming will not just happen, like The Beatles turning up to perform at a concert. The coming will only happen when we are prepared and we are taking our time at doing it; two thousand years so far. We are so slow to learn how to prepare despite the gospels being full of instructive guidelines.

The basic one is ‘losing your life in order to find it’ (Mk 8:35). Jesus said this repeatedly and then did it himself. And his is ‘the Way’. So the practice of ‘losing my life’ in every event of every day is the key to the future. Sport, art, politics and religion all shout this at us ‘from a high mountain.’ Advent is the time to hear this message.

If we could find our way to do so, we could bring justice and development to the nation and not just this nation but countries everywhere. OK, it’s a dream. But dreams have a habit of coming true. Martin Luther King’s, for instance.

10 December 2023          Advent 2B     Is 40:1…11      2 Pt 3:8-14      Mk 1:1-8