Homilies

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.

The throne of our King does not look like a throne. It is a cross planted outside the city, with a crude sign nailed above his head and a handful of people watching while the crowd mocks and walks away. The rulers scoff, the soldiers make jokes, even a dying criminal joins in. It looks like weakness and failure.

Yet this is the moment when the true King of the Universe is revealed. The eternal Son of the Father has emptied himself, born of a woman, obedient even to this shameful death. And precisely here, when every earthly measure says he has lost, he begins to reign. One man sees it. One man, condemned justly by his own admission, looks at the crucified Jesus and recognizes a King. He turns and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”