I’ll never forget the first time I attended church in Advent hearing these lines: “you brood of vipers, who told you to flee from the wrath to come?” Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Share what you have with others; don’t use passive or direct threats, or gossip behind others’ backs, to get what you want; be satisfied in collecting what you’re owed. Easy enough I thought.
As time went on though, the words, “Jesus is coming with a winnowing fork to sift the chaff from the grain; to strip away our sin so we can become fruitful witnesses, took on new meaning. My sense of who I and how I thought the world, and others should function, had been challenged over the years. I realized that others had distinctive gifts, experiences, insights, backgrounds and even insider knowledge that caused them to see things differently and so to pursue different things, and that I might actually be wrong about several things.
It’s not that I was naive to that reality. Rather, I no longer knew where or how I fit into the world. I felt lost and insecure. This of course ramped up into jealousy when others were lauded for doing things that I couldn’t and frustration when things weren’t going the way I felt was right. I fell into a state of spiritual sloth, no longer trusting that God had a purpose for me, I lost motivation for study and prayer. In that spiritual immaturity, I’d become blind to the ways God works through multiple people and circumstances to reveal his will.
And then I heard this passage having just come from a class where we were talking about how every word of Scripture addresses us - we are not just the good guys but the bad too. And boy did I hear it: you brood of vipers! It was as if God had reached out and shaken the ground under my seat to wake me up to my own St. Paul-like blindness. Stop confusing your own ways with God’s. That pride will blind you to God’s work in your own and other people’s lives. Pride is rather universal. It starts with good intentions. To do right. To change the world and make it better. To bring about justice and righteousness.
But it becomes a sin when you use your own limited perspective as the benchmark for all people and all events that are actually being moved by God according to his own design. This is why pride is a mortal sin. It’s the failure to make a distinction between your desire and God’s desire. It puts you and your desires and your ignorance of God’s work ahead of your listening to, learning from, and following God. So it’s the failure to follow the first commandment to love God. It also often ends up hurting other people, causing tension, strife, hardening of hearts and reduction in others’ capacity to follow Jesus. It is making others stumble before God. This is a failure to follow the second commandment to love neighbour.
I was shaken hard by this Gospel reading. In his reflection on Advent, Alfred Delp, a German Catholic priest, philosopher and martyr who resisted the Nazi regime, described Advent as the time when we are brought face-to-face with Jesus Christ, the full power of God’s judgment of our sin, and his mercy to us who are incapable of escaping that sin ourselves.
He wrote: “Advent is a time when we ought to be shaken [out of our complacency, ignorance, bitterness, and hard heartedness] and brought to a realization of ourselves.” For Jesus to be born in us, for his Spirit to whittle away the chaff of our presumptuous, self involved ways, we need to stop projecting our ideals onto the world, and onto other people’s lives.
The ideals of God alone are what we need to seek for living with others. That’s what Jesus is driving at when he says we need to share what we have. It’s not just about sharing a coat or our material things; it’s about recognizing that we are sharing in God’s world, his kingdom, with other people who are each uniquely made in God’s image for purposes we often cannot see or understand. This is why we are to approach others not with judgments, or coercion, or gossip, or passive or actual threat; but with humility, recognizing that others have the basic needs we do to live; but that each person’s life in and before God carries with it only part of God’s own story.
So therefore we need to stop being presumptuous, entitled, and narrow minded, projecting our own ways onto others so that we don’t build imaginary worlds that cause us to hide out from God who demands that we constantly remain alert to our own biases, blindnesses, pride filled presumptions, so we can remain open to being transformed by the true saviour and king of this world, God himself. Delp writes that remaining constantly alert, attentive and open to what God is doing rather than retreating to our own comfort zones can cause “shocked awakening” which is a necessary part of allowing Christ to renew us. “But” he writes, it is “at the same time … blessed with God’s promises which … kindle the inner light in our hearts.
Being shattered, being awakened … [i]n the bitterness of awakening, in the helplessness of “coming to” in the wretchedness of realizing our limitations,” this is how we embrace Christ making changes in us that allow us to see the world - whatever our circumstances - with the hope of God’s love being poured out and gathering all things to him.
The genuine waiting of Advent that leads to joy has nothing to do with our own power to accomplish; but in our refusal to engage in actions of spiritual pride that see us at the center of making everything work. It is the humility of waiting on God to come to us in his Holy Spirit, allowing God to penetrate our hearts by which we become good grain where others can encounter the true power of God’s penetrating earth shaking love and joy. AMEN
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