Second Sunday of Advent

Dominica II Adventus A

8 December 2019

 God has no grandchildren.  We are accustomed to hearing that we are, by faith and baptism, sons and daughters of God.  We are, as we say, God’s children… but God has no GRANDchildren!

 What does that mean?  It means that a person does not have a relationship with God, at least not the kind that He desires and invites us to, the kind that transforms and saves, because someone in your family has, or once had, a relationship with God.  In other words, relationship with God is not inherited.  The relationship with God that transforms and saves requires an intentional decision.  It is something immediate and direct, not something based on nearness to someone else who has that relationship.  That’s the lesson of aphorism: That each person has a personal decision to make to turn from sin and to live as a disciple of Jesus.  Relationship with Jesus is not cultural or inherited.  God has no grandchildren.  We pray, do we not, “Our Father,” not “Our Grandfather, who art in heaven”?

 In his preaching in his time St. John the Baptist seems to recognize the call to personal decision, personal responsibility, in being a person of faith.  He says to the religious Pharisees and Sadducees: “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?  Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance.  And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’  For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.  Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees.  Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”  St. John highlights the same truths about each person being intentional in the life of faith.  He preaches the requirement of producing good fruit.  He requires evidence of repentance, of each person’s turning from old ways in response to the advent of Jesus.  Standing there at the River Jordan St. John blows out of the water the notion of an inherited, familial faith.  “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’.”

 In the Gospel “Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan” were at fever pitch because of St. John’s preaching.  So many centuries of prophecy had been made and everyone expected a new exodus, a new event of God’s saving work.  To that end it is noteworthy that St. John is at the Jordan, the very place where the first Exodus had ended as God’s people crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land.  Standing in that spot signals God is doing something new.  We each have a decision that only we can make.  God has no grandchildren.  Choose to be, and give evidence that, you are a child of God.  “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”