Making straight the way of the Lord

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 3:1-12) shows us scenes from the ministry of St John the Baptist, the one who came to make straight the way of the Lord. Like a distant prophetic figure out of the Old Testament – in a sense, the last of the Old Testament prophets who all point forward to Christ – St John, the cousin of the Lord, calls the listening Israelites to repentance, urges them to do good, and to be mindful of the eternal consequences of their actions. In the most alarming metaphors, He predicts, moreover, the figure of the Christ who will baptise the people with the Holy Spirit and fire, and winnow the good from the evil in an eternal settlement of justice. There are many ways in which such a scene and such messages could be approached. Yet one theme that strikes the reader today is what we might see as St John the Baptist’s call to reality: his call to sinners to see the reality about themselves and the reality of the stakes of this life.

Who am I and, even, why am I not that other person? Hardly anybody ask themselves these things explicitly, but they are inquiries that underlie our earliest sense of self. The waters of the self soon become muddied through our engagement with sin, and then, our waywardness, the result of the wounds of original sin, becomes compounded by our growing inability to face the truth about the mistakes we have made. As Hilaire Belloc says in one bitingly satirical poem:

If you have luck you find in early youth

How dangerous it is to tell the Truth.

Especially, we might add, the truth about ourselves. St John the Baptist addresses the Pharisees and the Sadducees, but when he calls them a brood of vipers, he is speaking to us through them. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance, he advises them, as he advises us all. But the mould and blight of self-deception lies in various thicknesses upon our otherwise fruitful actions. How well do we know ourselves? Better than we think, most likely, for otherwise, we would have no instinct for covering up our deceits, if not with outright lies, then with our reverse-engineered justifications, the false trails we lay for others to still believe in us. And when we do these things, we make ourselves the children of the Father of Lies whose writhing form is sometimes depicted beneath the feet of the Virgin Mother. When Moses made a serpent of brass and hung it on the crotch of a tree to cure the Israelites of the poisonous snake bites, his action symbolised that the Christ would look like any other viper or sinner, and yet He would bring not poison but a cure. We are not so evil as to be beyond redemption; there is a cure for us. But neither are we so good as to be able to free ourselves easily from the entanglements of self-deception, from our lack of realism. We must, as St Teresa of Avila tells us, eat the bread of self-knowledge with every meal. Knowing who we are is part of the road back towards God, for it was by a category error about ourselves – wishing to be as gods – that we left the path that He had fixed for us originally.

And if St John the Baptist calls us to be realists about ourselves, he also calls us back to reality over the consequences of our actions. As we reflected on in a recent post, time rises in our hearts like the crest of a mountain on either side of which lie the eternal destinies of the good and the wicked. We enjoy with our faculty of freedom the possibility of getting home but we incur the risk of getting lost on the way. And this freedom is meant for something. St John’s metaphors depict Jesus as a farmer who winnows his harvest in search of the good grain; we belong to the divine orchard and are destined to bear fruit or to be felled. In other words, ours is a qualified freedom; we are free for something. God did not make us free to invent our own selfish worlds but to share freely in His world of unquenchable goodness. There may have been a time when Catholics were taught too brutally about these eternal risks, like children of neurotic parents taught to live in a state of constant emotional trauma. But now we have run to the other extreme where God is either an indulgent Sugar Daddy, benignly satisfied with the gift of our distracted attention, or a cool bro who would never do anything so evil as to hold us to account. But the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire, promises the prophet of the Lord. When did we last hear that message? We are fools if we do not reflect on it from time to time, as the Exercises of St Ignatius urge us to.

These are the means by which St John tries to make the way straight for the Lord. If our ears are to be opened to the good news to come, we need self-knowledge; we need to shed the lies with which we comfort ourselves and face our worse selves only to bring them to the healing touch of Christ. He is an orchardist on the look out for unfruitful trees, but He is also the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep. He is not in the end a farming merchant or trader but a Father, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

And, likewise, if our hearts are to accept the call that He offers us and that we wish to attend to, we must reflect often on the eternal vistas that stretch away on either side of the crest of time upon which we walk: to the right, the everlasting hills of the divine country which bathe our hearts in the light of hope, and to the left, the unfathomable lake of fire, as seen in St John the Apostle’s vision.

As the great Fulton Sheen said, reflecting on the crosses of the criminals that stood either side of the innocent Christ: Let us not presume: one thief remained unrepentant. Let us not despair; one thief stole heaven.