Fr. Chas Kestermeier, S.J.
Reflections for Bulletin of Parish in Singapore

Fr. Kestermeier, S.J. was asked to write periodic Sunday reflections for
the parish bulletin for a Parish in Singapore and he has shared them with us.
 

 Third Sunday of Advent (Year B)(17 december 2023)

            Psalm response: My soul rejoices in my God.

            In the middle of our Advent prayer, we have a moment of hope and joy as we perceive that the Lord is actually almost visible, as we sense that what we have sought and prayed for is right before us.  In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah exults at how God has called him to give hope and to be someone who actually brings that hope into reality by his words and deeds, and the psalmist asks us to recognize what is happening.  “The Lord himself is near,” Paul proclaims and asks us to rejoice over the end of our anxiety, a peace which goes beyond our human understanding.
            And what does the Baptist, that last of the prophets, have to say?  He invites us to get our lives in line with the Lord’s own life in us because it is God himself who will come to baptize in fire and the Holy Spirit, to gather his own and call them to him. 
            So much seems clear, a very definite calling us to look, to see, to understand, and to rejoice: God is with us, quite literally, but he comes not as a simple wonder-worker or a superhero.  We must seek him, detect him, recognize him, and love him and serve him in those who are small, spurned, or crippled by poverty, in the ones who need our help on the journey home to God – all our sisters and brothers.  God’s coming is not only imminent, but he will now be visibly immanent in our world, the world each of us has to cope with every day. 
            John’s words to the crowds, the tax collectors, and the soldiers offer a very fundamental sort of morality, which we might compare to the simple water he uses to symbolize their conversion, but he points ahead to a very different sort of cleansing which will be a true and penetrating conversion: the flame of the Holy Spirit will not only cleanse and purify, they will energize and fill with light and urgency.
            While John’s baptism was symbolic of the interior change that was happening in those who approached him and was a sign of the fruits that they could expect their passage through that rite to bear in their lives, the baptism of the Messiah and his Spirit will be primarily interior and will bear its fruit not in the exterior and visible acts of our lives alone but first and primarily in the joyful cleansing and refreshing of our inner lives – which will bear constant fruits springing from whom we have become, not just the restrained fruits that John was calling people to. 
            The conversion of our selves and our lives in the baptism Christ calls us to is a goal, not a destination for us in this life, but as we press on toward that goal we find that we become more sure of ourselves, more mature in our daily prayer and our lives, more Christlike – and could there be a better reason to rejoice? 
            In that deeper conversion, we celebrate our release by releasing others; the realization and accomplishment of our hope is our becoming hope to others and is the end to the desperation of our hungering for our God in the flesh of his Son.  Our celebration is not a mere end to dealing with problems, it is that the Lord who is coming guarantees that our service is fruitful for us as well as for those we lift up in love. 

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