Humble John

St. Joseph Church (Cottleville)
Third Sunday of Advent
December 14, 2008 - 12:15 p.m.

Is 61:1-2a, 10-11
Lk 1 (Response)
1 Thes 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28

St. John the Baptist sure must have drawn a lot of attention to himself! Last week we heard how he appeared in the desert, seemingly out of nowhere, clothed in camel’s hair and a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey. Today he calls himself a voice crying out. Obviously we’d all be a bit taken aback if we ran into someone like that today, but I doubt it was a common sight 2000 years ago either.

Yet despite all of these things that seem like idiosyncrasies, things that would attract attention to themselves, John the Baptist was a perfect model of humility. These things weren’t meant to draw attention to himself. His entire being and his sole purpose in life was to point the way to Christ. He got the attention of a lot of people. Crowds flocked to him to be baptized. We hear in today’s gospel how even the priests and Levites went out to him to ask who he was. Yet, whenever these crowds came to him, he always pointed their attention elsewhere. The gospel tells us, “He was not the light, but came to testify to the light.” And he says himself, “There is one coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.” John understood, he had a clear picture of what was about to take place in their midst, and he called people’s attention to it. And because he had directed his entire life to proclaiming the coming of the Messiah, he recognized Him when He finally came.

John the Baptist is one of the most prominent figures of this Advent season. The Church holds him out to us as a saint we need to emulate. Obviously we’re not all supposed to go walking around in camel’s hair munching on locusts. What the Church is calling us to is the same humility. To be humble means to recognize that I am nothing without God, that everything I have and am is a gift from Him. It means so arranging our lives that we draw our attention and the attention of others not to ourselves but to God alone.

If we’re going to orient our lives radically towards Him, we need only ask a very simple question: where is He? The answer is just as simple. We know that the greatest treasure our Lord has left to His Church is His own abiding presence in the Holy Eucharist. That’s what draws us here Sunday after Sunday. We come because we know that He will be present here, that He will accept our own humble offering of ourselves and join it to His offering of Himself to the Father. We come because we need to grace He gives us in Holy Communion, when He gives us nothing short of Himself.

Our parish is blessed in a particular way by the Eucharistic adoration chapel in our church. The chapel is open 24 hours a day from 7:00 on Monday morning until 7:45 on Saturday morning. Our Lord waits there, exposed in the monstrance for our adoration, day and night. He waits to welcome anyone who would come to spend even just a few moments with Him. I would like to suggest this as a very simple practice we can adopt to foster this important virtue of humility in ourselves, a way to more perfectly direct our entire lives towards Jesus Christ. If we truly believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist, and if we truly believe that our lives are meaningless if they’re not totally directed towards Him, we should have a longing to spend time in His presence. We should crave the peace that comes to us from Christ in the Eucharist. Time in adoration is a simple way to fulfill St. Paul’s exhortation to pray always. Perhaps today, we could each reflect upon our lives. Perhaps we could make a commitment to spend some time with our Lord each week in adoration. It doesn’t have to be long. If an hour or a half hour seems like too much, give Him a few minutes. A stable was good enough for Him when He came among us the first time. If all you have to give Him now is a stable, He’ll take it.

If we find it in ourselves to make this commitment, the commitment to orient our lives more fully to our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, we will not regret it. Our lives will begin to become more meaningful. In adoration we will come to know our God more perfectly, and so we will recognize Him more easily. We will recognize Him when we hear the priest say to us at Mass: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” We will recognize that at that moment He wants to give Himself to us totally, to be consumed by us that He might totally consume us. We will recognize Him when we meet Him in disguise throughout our day – in a spouse, a child, a sibling, in a coworker, a classmate, in the poor man who asks for a meal, in the unborn child who cries out for life.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity that in humbling ourselves before the Lord we will find ourselves exalted by Him. St. Luke tells us that John was filled with the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Himself says that no one greater has ever been born. The same sorts of things will happen for us when we make Christ our all in all. We will be able to repeat confidently with the prophet Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. . . . He has clothed me with a robe of salvation and wrapped me in a mantle of justice, like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem, like a bride bedecked with her jewels.”

As we turn now to this holy altar, let us beg Him for the grace of humility – the grace to kneel humbly before Him in adoration. So may we open ourselves to be clothed with that robe and wrapped in that mantle, to welcome Him more fully into the stable of our hearts this Christmas and every day of our lives.