Homilies

Before sunrise on a December morning, an ordinary man walked the road toward mass on the hill of Tepeyac. He was not a governor, not a soldier, not a spokesman for a cause. Juan Diego was simply faithful—poor, overlooked, living in a world torn open by conquest, suspicion, and fear.

That is precisely where Our Lady chose to appear.

Guadalupe does not arrive as a badge for one side. She comes as Mother—Madre de Dios—for a wounded, divided society. Her presence says: you are not merely rivals, classes, or camps. You are children. One Mother, many peoples. She speaks to Juan Diego in a way he can receive, and she sends him back into the conflict with a task larger than himself.

Many of us might admit that this Jubilee Year of Hope has passed quietly by. It is on the Church’s calendar, but not always on our minds. Yet the very idea of a Jubilee is to interrupt ordinary time, to shake loose the dust that settles over our faith, and to let God do something new within us.

Into that same kind of spiritual drowsiness steps John the Baptist. He does not arrive gently. He is rough, strange, even unsettling: camel hair on his shoulders, the dust of the desert on his feet, wild insects for food. God chooses this man precisely because he cannot be ignored. His very presence is a question: have you grown too comfortable in your faith?

Advent arrives like an alarm clock in the dark. The world keeps moving at its usual pace—work and meals, holidays and travel, screens glowing late into the night—yet the Lord gently shakes our shoulder and gives a single, urgent command: “Therefore, stay awake!”

When Jesus speaks of the days of Noah, he does not describe spectacular sins. He speaks of people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Ordinary life. Good things, but lived as if God were unnecessary. People so absorbed in what was immediately in front of them that they never lifted their eyes to what was coming toward them. The flood did not surprise them because it was hidden; it surprised them because they were spiritually asleep.