In the gospel reading for 7 December 2025, St. Matthew brings our attention to the figure of St. John the Baptist. It’s really impossible to grasp the significance of Jesus without passing through the “cleansing bath” of St. John The Baptist. He provides a lens through which Jesus is properly interpreted.
St. Matthew tells us St. John the Baptist made his appearance as a preacher in the Judean desert. What is it about deserts in the Bible? Moses spends years in the desert before taking up his work. Elijah sojourns in a deserted place at a crisis point in his ministry. Of course, the Israelites have to pass through the desert 40 years on the way to the Promised Land. Jesus himself spends 40 days and nights in the desert before beginning his public work. Near the beginning of the Christian movement, monks sequestered themselves in caves and primitive shelters in the desert. What is it about deserts? They are places of simplicity and poverty, where everything is stripped down to the basics. Places where distractions and attachments are eliminated in order to hear the voice of God.
In our modern day lives, we are distracted by so many different things. Sometimes we dive into the world of distractions on purpose in order to get away from the really fundamental questions. Some folks spend a lot of their life lying to themselves and using the distractions of the world to cover over it. That’s why we all need a desert of some sort. Then there are the worldly attachments: the four greatest of which are power, pleasure, honor, and wealth, according to St. Thomas Aquinas. These 4 things are constantly trying to temp us. But, in order to hear God speaking to us, we have to get rid of distractions and attachments long enough to at least hear what God wants of us. Advent for us is supposed to be a kind of desert time. We are preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ. We’re meant to strip ourselves down in order to encounter Christ in deeper ways. But, of course, our culture isn’t going to help us in this project. It wants us to be in a frenzy, right up until Christmas.
The first thing that John the Baptist tells us in the desert is “Reform your lives.” This word is so important because, if we are honest with ourselves, we all know that our lives are not what they are supposed to be. The quality of love that ought to be present in everyone one of us – I mean a complete, absolute, self forgetting love, is not present. As St. Paul said, “We’ve all fallen short of the glory of God.” We’ve all fallen into patterns of self-absorption, addiction, and attachment. So, out of the desert comes this voice. Out of that place of clarification, simplification, comes this voice: “Reform your lives.” The word that John uses here in the Greek, the same one used by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry is metanoiate. It means literally to go beyond the mind that you have. Change your attitude. Change your way of thinking. Change your way of perceiving the world. One way to live this is to stop thinking about my life as my project. Start thinking my life is not about me. Start thinking my life belongs to God and serves God’s purposes. See, all of our diversions and attachments are symptoms that my life is about me, that my life is a project of self-satisfaction. Oh things aren’t going my way. Things aren’t following the career path I had mapped out. People aren’t respecting me the way I think they should. Who cares? All that is trivial. Change your attitude. Your life is about God. That’s the voice that comes out of the desert, the place of clarification. And when it does, it causes in us an examination of conscience. Then, as the people of John’s time did, we confess our sins. We put to speech the deficiencies found while in the desert and confess them to God. This is why many Catholic parishes, will have penance services during Advent. They are a time to confess our faults; to make way for the coming of God into our lives in new ways.
St. John says, “I am baptizing you with water, but the one coming after me – He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” In St. John’s thinking, being immersed in water was a preparation ritual for encountering God. He took the Jewish ritual of bathing in a special way, which is called mikvah in Hebrew, and modifies it to prepare people for a powerful encounter with God. But here, St. John is saying, the one who is coming is so much more than another prophet who speaks the word of God. The one who is coming IS the Word of God. He is much more than a teacher who bears witness to the life of God, because he IS the life of God. That’s why he can dip you, that’s what baptism meant in Greek, to dip into – this one can dip you into the very life of God. He can baptize you in the Holy Spirit. What he’s coming to do is to fill you up, body and soul, with the divine life. He can set you on fire with a whole new manner of existence.
But something needs to happen in us to make room for this encounter. Jesus says, “The axe lies at the root of the trees.” In other words, the Christ who is coming will indeed cut and divide and judge. Not because he is cruel, but when the divine life comes in, whatever is opposed to it must go out. There is an expulsive quality to Christ’s arrival. That’s why all patterns of hatred and self absorption, pettiness, egotism have to be cut out, in order to make room for a new existence.
Then we hear, “his winnowing fan is in his hand.” This image is drawn from the agricultural life of the time. The farmer would put the harvest of the wheat on the threshing floor. And then he would take a kind of rake, called a winnowing fan, and he would cast it up into the air and the wind would blow through it and the chaffe would blow away (this lighter material) while the more substantial wheat would fall to the threshing floor. So it goes when the wind of the Holy Spirit blows through you and me. He blows away the chaff to be burned in the fire. But that’s good news that He will burn away all this pettiness, all this insubstantial stuff that preoccupies us. The Holy Spirit will blow that away and allow what is truly substantial in us to endure. That’s what’s going to happen when Christ baptizes in fire and the Holy Spirit. And by the way, it’s also not a bad description of what Purgatory is all about, but, that is another topic for another time.
I hope we allow the words of St. John the Baptist to draw us to Christ this Advent season. He’s given us much to think about and reflect on. Blessed Advent to you all!
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