Third Sunday of Advent: "He will baptize you with fire and the Holy Spirit"

 

Today's Readings, click here

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Homily

John the Baptist’s preaching calls tax collectors not to cheat people. He instructs soldiers not to bully people. You ought to share with others. You don’t have to believe in God to be a decent person. You can be a housewife, pagan Roman soldier or a Jewish tax collector that collaborates with the brutal Romans occupying your country. Still, you can avoid working in a way that makes life worse. Virtue is the capacity for moral behavior. We can all see the value in human goodness. John’s preaching then turns to the one whose sandal he is unworthy to fasten, who will dip us in the Holy Spirit and will separate the wheat from the chaff. This story is about nature and grace.
 
What is natural virtue?
A human being can be good without believing in God. Human beings have the natural capacity for moral behavior. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, taught that virtue was the means between two extremes. For instance, if you imagine a stairway, with the bottom step being cowardice and the top step being reserved for the fool-hardy, courage is midway up the stairs. The virtue of courage is the mean between cowardice and fool-hardiness. According to Aristotle, all virtue is midway between opposing vices. So, generosity is midway between miserliness and being a wastrel. Every human being is theoretically capable of virtue in this regard. But, humanity cannot transcend the human condition without help. If human virtue were enough, the world would not be such a mess. Something more is needed.
 
What is Grace?
Grace is not natural; it is the free, unmerited gift of God that gives us the capacity to enter into God’s world. You cannot enter into the life of grace without learning a new language and a new way of being.  Learning a foreign language is like entering a foreign world.  If you want to learn biblical Greek you have to first learn a different alphabet. After you learn the alphabet you have to learn what the words mean. After you learn what the words mean, then you have to learn some very different grammatical rules to understand what is being communicated in a sentence. Language doesn’t care if you learn it or don’t, it is just there. You need to adapt, or you are out of the game. Your world remains small.  Think of God like learning a foreign language. You either learn to love God as he is or you remain unchanged. God isn’t going to change for you.
 
Nature and Grace
Do you remember the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in prayer that appears later in the gospel of Luke?

He then addressed this parable to those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else. Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector. The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.’  But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, ‘O God, be merciful to me a sinner.’  I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”  Luke 18:9-14 

The Pharisee probably was virtuous in the sense that Aristotle discussed. That is not enough. We must be humble before God if we are to enter the life of grace.
 
Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity
Grace saves human nature by lifting up our limited capacity for goodness to an end beyond nature. Grace directs and transforms flawed human goodness towards God in the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Forgive ‘seventy times seven times.’  Mt. 18:21-22 Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you. Lk. 6:27. Blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of God. Lk. 6:20  Later, in Luke's gospel, Jesus says about John the Baptist, 

I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” 7:28

Grace perfects and raises up nature.
 
After his resurrection Jesus appeared to his disciples, “And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,

“Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” John 20:19-23.

God alone can forgive sins. Jesus gave the authority over sin to his disciples because the Church participates in and is the messenger of grace.  Faith brings you beyond your own sense of moral goodness to trust in the Church’s mission to reconcile the world to God. Our hope is that responding to God, we ourselves find our way to him and show others the way in charity. America’s greatest sins are probably not greed, lust and violence. Our greatest disconnection from God and others is our presumption on God’s grace. This Monday at 5:30 pm, our parish will have its Advent Penance Service. You are cordially invited.

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Two from G.K. Chesterton appropo of grace and sin:

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

"The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat."