December 5, 2020
Straightening Your Path
If Jesus was coming to your house tomorrow for dinner, how would you prepare for that? And when would you have started preparing? Probably as soon as you found out, right? As soon as you found out, okay, Jesus is coming for dinner next week, you would have been like, "Okay, let's come up with a plan, alright? Let's clean the house, let's get things ready. Let's make sure it's the best meal ever," and so many other things we would have been thinking about if Jesus was coming to your house for dinner tomorrow night.
Advent is about preparing for Jesus to come into our lives, and into the world, in a new way. There's no question that the world needs Jesus to come into it in a new way. I think that's a statement of the obvious for most people at this time. But if that's true then it's also true that we need him to come into our lives in a new way because God comes into the world through you and me. He comes into the world through our words, through our actions, through our thoughts, through our attitudes. That's primarily how God manifests in the world. Are we doing a good job of that? And so this time of preparation, this time of Advent, is a time for us to ask ourselves, "Okay, are we prepared for God to come into our lives in new ways?"
Tomorrow at Mass, we hear the reading of John the Baptist. The voice crying in the wilderness—prepare the way of the Lord, make straight your path—John talks about. In what ways does your path need straightening? In what ways is God saying, "You've wandered a bit off the path there"? In what ways is God inviting you back to his path, to the straight and narrow?
And of course, tomorrow we go to Mass, we receive Jesus in the Eucharist. And very often we do that in a very unprepared state. You see people rushing into Church. You see people sort of just casually wandering up the aisle to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. And sometimes we are those people. And I think we have to ask ourselves, "Okay, how do I prepare to receive Jesus into my soul, the deepest part of myself when I go to Church on Sunday?" Because in some ways, we have this mini-Advent experience, preparing to have Jesus enter into our lives, to have Jesus enter into a new world—we have this mini-Advent experience every time we go to Mass because we're preparing for Jesus to come into the world in the Eucharist, Jesus to come into our lives, and to reside deep, deep, deep in our soul. And that should change us. That should make us different. We should leave Mass different than when we arrived at Mass. And that should change us. That should make us different. We should leave Mass renewed, refreshed, and ready to go into the world to bring Jesus and his patience, and his kindness, and his generosity, and his compassion to as many people as possible.