Second Sunday of Advent C

Image: "Prepare," 
©Jan Richardson.

December 6, 2015

Click here for scripture readings.

Our minds have a mind of their own.

Thoughts think themselves, seemingly undirected by the thinker.

The discovery of this simple and undeniable facet of our makeup can be quite startling.

We fantasize we are in complete control of mental processes.

However, the actual situation seems to be quite different.

When we concentrate, we can focus thinking along a certain path.

But if we relax attention, certain automatic mental processes kick in.

The automatic process that concerns John the Baptist is how we deal with the wounds that have been inflicted on us and the wounds we have inflicted on others.

In religious language, his focus is on how the mind seduces us into identifying with sin.

There is an adhesive quality about sinful experiences. They stick.

We remember the beatings, the humiliations, the hateful glances, and the mocking words.

The wrongs done to us are available to memory in a way neutral and even positive experiences are not.

Although the experience of sin begins with being sinned against, we are quick learners in this way of being human.

We soon learn to wound others.

We engage in hitting, lying, cheating, betraying, etc.

We need to protect and promote ourselves at all costs.

Any behavior that appears to further this narrow and intense self-preoccupation we embrace.

Soon we can tell our life story in term of blows received and blows given.

It is a tale of sin; and even if we repress it, it secretly shapes our sense of who we are.

This attraction of the mind to the negative has a cumulative effect.

As the mind simultaneously nurtures a sense of victimhood and wallows in guilt over its own mistakes, sin rises to a new status in the interior life. We gradually begin to identity with the sinful dimension of our lives.

In our own eyes, we become, above all else, one who has been sinned against and one who sins in turn.

We are the receiver and giver of blows, and the highest compliment is, "He gave as good as he got."

The mind is convinced this is the "real us," and it defends this identity by citing facts and providing rationalizations.

Nothing can disprove this obvious truth.

However, there is an important distinction to be made in telling this inner story of sin.

The distinction is between what has happened and what the mind does with what has happened.

We really have been maltreated, victims of the wrongdoing of others; and we really have maltreated others, making them victims of our wrongdoing.

Not to acknowledge this active participation in the sin of the world is to be either incredibly dense or in chronic denial.

But the point is not the sheer factuality of moral evil. The point is what the mind does with these experiences.

It enthrones them as the secret and irreversible truth about the human person.

Sinner becomes the depth identity, the loudest interior noise that blocks out any refuting voices.

The result is an ever-deepening connection of who we are with the wrongs done to us and by us.

Our identification with sin becomes a serious roadblock—a mountain in the way, a winding and rough path that means slow travel, a valley that delays arrival.

 Jesus cannot get to us with his radical address that we are the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

When we cling to our identity as sinner, his words cannot penetrate the armor of our hardened self-evaluation.

He is not the One Who Is to Come, but the One Sin Keeps Away.

That is why John the Baptist is needed as preparation for Christ.

He enables people to go beyond the mind and let go of sins.

This repentance that leads to the forgiveness of sins is a subtle process, but it is not an impossible one.

Two key insights often help us.

The first insight involves our awareness of the nature of the mind.

When we become aware of the powerful tendency of the mind to hold onto sin, we are already beyond it.

We see what it is doing, and so we are more than it.

We transcend the mind by noticing how it works.

When this happens, a sense of spaciousness replaces the sense of restriction and a sense of freedom replaces the sense of compulsion.

We feel we have walked through a door into a hidden room that feels like home.

We are closer to who we really are.

The second insight involves an implication of the basic Christian conviction of the unconditional forgiveness of God.

God is ultimate reality and, therefore, if God holds the sin, the sin transcends the flow of time and remains permanently present.

But if God has let go of the sin, then who is holding on?

The forgiveness of God clears the way for us to see where the real action is.

The real action is the mind and how it clings to negative evaluations. The question changes from "Will God forgive me?" to "How can I go beyond the mind that clings to sin, even though God has forgiven me?"

Before we can hear the words that Jesus heard, “you are my beloved child, in you I am well pleased,” we will have to undergo John’s baptism which entails a repentance that leads to the forgiveness of sins.

If we do this, the path is cleared.