The Kingdom Of God Is At Hand
2020년 12월 6일The Kingdom Of God Is At Hand
< Second Sunday of Advent >
I still remember teaching about John the Baptist to a group of young people in Korea preparing to be baptized into the Catholic Church. John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest in the Temple of Jerusalem. So John was entitled to become a priest like his father if he wanted. But no, the prestige, the power and the popularity of the priesthood did not appeal to John. Why? Because he knew something more important than the priesthood; indeed something more important than the Temple; in fact, something more important than Jerusalem was about to become a reality: nothing less than the long awaited Kingdom of God, inaugurated by none other than the long awaited Messiah.
So John gave it all up: the priesthood, the Temple, and Jerusalem, to live in the desert depending totally on God alone. Instead of robes of fine linen, he wore a tunic of camel skin, with a leather belt around his waist. He survived not by feasting on bread, wine and roasted meat, but by eating locusts and wild honey. It was at this point that one of my students said, “Yuck! That’s disgusting! I hate honey!” That’s when I found out that Koreans sometimes eat locusts or grasshoppers. I’m not going to lie, I’ve learned to eat them myself. But that’s not the point of the story. John was willing to sacrifice a good life for a better life when justice and mercy will herald God’s kingdom on earth. We are in a similar situation. COVID has forced us to give up so many things. We want so badly to go back to what we thought was normal. But in many ways the world that we knew has changed. The old order is passing away. We who believe in Christ should be more prepared than most to welcome Christ in our midst. COVID forced us to live without many things. May our faith reveal that we need only one thing: the gospel of Christ and the holy Eucharist to give us the power to live and reveal and share it with our changing world.