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"There shall come forth a shoot from the stump or Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."

Sunday Readings
The first reading is taken from the book of Isaiah 11:1-10. To help us prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas, the Church recalls the prophecies of the great Isaiah on each of the four Sundays of Advent. To encourage the Chosen People who were wavering in their loyalty to Yahweh their true God because of the bad example of their worldly leaders, the prophet reminds them of him who is to come.

The second reading is from the letter of Paul to the Romans 15:4-9. "Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction." St. Paul is referring to the inspired books of the Old Testament from which we learn of the existence of the true God, from whom all things came to be.

The Gospel is from Matthew 3:1-12. In this holy season of Advent, as we prepare to welcome Christ at Christmas, John the Baptist has words of advice and warning for each one of us. He advises us to "prepare the way of the Lord," by true repentance of our past sins and a firm resolution to straighten "the ways of the Lord," that is, not to deviate from the true Christian way of life in the future. Hopefully none of us deserves the reproaches he addressed to the Pharisees and Sadducees, but most of us perhaps can find traces of some predominant vices in our innermost selves. The pride and self-righteousness of the Pharisees ruined their otherwise good lives. The worldliness of the Sadducees made them lose interest in the future life, until they went so far as to deny any future existence after death. Of these two vices, that of the Sadducees is the more prevalent today and it is to be found in the best of us, in a greater or lesser degree. While all true Christians repudiate atheism, with its denial of the existence of God and of a future life, many become so immersed in the things of this world that they have no time or thought for the world that is to come. While theoretically they reject atheism, they themselves, like the "brood of vipers" of whom the Baptist spoke, are full of the poison of materialism, and are injecting this poison into those whom they influence.

A sincere examination of our outlook on life and death, and of our way of life up to today, will tell us how we stand in relation to Christ. Let each one of us ask himself: if Christ, for whose coming as the Divine Babe of Bethlehem we are preparing, were to come to us before Christmas as our just judge, how would we fare? Would we be gathered with the wheat into the granary, or be bundled with the chaff into the unquenchable fire? Each one of us has the decision in his own hands. We can, by true repentance, change ourselves from chaff into wheat, but once we draw our last breath, not even the infinitely merciful God can do that for us.

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Advent Reflection: Dare to Step Forward toward God's Mysterious Presence
From early times the Church's liturgy has set words from one of the psalms at the beginning of Advent, words in which Israel's Advent, the boundless waiting of that people, has found concentrated expression: "To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul; O my God, in thee I trust . . ." (Ps 24:1). Such words may seem hackneyed to us, for we no longer attempt the adventures which lead man to his own inner self. While our maps of the earth have become more and more complete, man's inner self has become increasingly a terra incognita, an alien region, in spite of the fact that there are greater discoveries to be made there than in the visible universe.

To thee, O Lord, I lift up my soul: recently I came to a new awareness of the dramatic meaning behind this verse when reading an account which the French writer Julien Green recently published concerning his path to conversion to the Catholic Church. He tells how, in his youth, he was in bondage to "the pleasures of the flesh". He had no religious conviction to restrain him. And yet, the strange thing is that, now and again, he goes into a church with the unadmitted longing for some miracle to happen that would instantly set him free. "There was no miracle", he goes on, "but, from afar off, the sense of a presence." This presence warms him and seems to offer hope, but he is still repelled by the idea of salvation being connected with belonging to the Church. He desires this new presence but is unwilling to undertake renunciation; he wants to effect his own salvation, as it were, and without any serious effort. Thus he encounters Indian spirituality and hopes to find in it a better way. But he suffers the inevitable disappointment and begins to examine the Bible. He is so in earnest about this that he starts taking Hebrew lessons from a rabbi. One day the latter says to him: "Next Thursday I won't be coming since it's a holy day." "Holy day?" asks Green in surprise. "The Ascension—do I have to tell you that?" answers the rabbi. The young man in his earnest search is suddenly struck as by a thunderbolt: it is as if the words of the prophets were raining down upon him. "I was Israel", he says, "whom God was entreating to come home." I felt the application to myself of the words, "The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master's crib; but Israel does not know..." (Is 1:3).

This kind of experience of the truth of Scripture in our lives is what Advent is. This is what is meant by that verse, "I lift up my soul"; from being a hackneyed phrase it can become something new, adventurous and great if we begin to explore its truth.

Julien Green's account of his turbulent youth provides an amazingly accurate description of the struggles which our own age has to face. First of all there is the universal acceptance of the modern lifestyle, which on the one hand seems to us to be the inalienable form of our freedom yet is felt to be a slavery which it would take a miracle to abolish.

(And there is no question of the Church's old-fashioned ways being of any use here; the Church is not even regarded as an alternative. Exotic religions, by contrast, present a novel attraction.) And yet it is of great significance that the longing for liberation is not extinguished, that occasionally it asserts its influence in moments of quiet in a church. And it is this readiness to expose oneself to a mysterious presence, to accept it slowly and gradually, to allow it to penetrate, that enables Advent to take place, the first glimmer of light in however dark a night.

Sooner or later it becomes alarmingly clear: Yes,I am Israel. I am the ox that does not know its owner. And when, appalled, we get down from the pedestal of our pride, we find, as the Psalmist says, that our soul lifts itself up; it rises, and God's hidden presence penetrates ever deeper into our tangled lives. Advent is not a miracle out of the blue such as is offered by the preachers of revolution and the heralds of new ways of salvation. God acts in an entirely human way with us, leading us step by step and waiting for us. The days of Advent are like a quiet knocking at the door of our smothered souls, inviting us to undertake the risk of stepping forward toward God's mysterious presence, which alone can make us free.
—Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Seek That Which is Above

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