“This Advent, make yourself small, make yourself humble, make yourself a servant of others, and the Lord will give you the ability to understand how to make peace.” These are the words of Pope Francis this past week. 

Biblical scholars have found that the author of our gospel today, Luke, was an educated man, a physician, born in what today is Syria. Luke knew the value of history and wanted to make sure his listeners, his readers, would understand that John the Baptist and Jesus were anchored in time, in history. 

So Luke lays out for us a timetable if you will, by a documented review of just who was in charge. Israel was under the complete control of Rome. Let’s review the history laid out by Luke: 

Tiberius Caesar, the son of Augustus Caesar, was now in charge of the Roman world. His fifteenth year would be somewhere between 27 to 29AD, depending on what calendar one uses. 

We know all about Pontius Pilate. He was just installed as Roman procurator, and governed Judea and Samaria. 

Herod Antipas was the son of Herod the Great. Installed by Rome Herod Antipas governed Galilee when John began his preaching. He would have John beheaded after John condemned Herod’s marriage to Herodias, the one time wife of his half brother Philip. Philip governed regions northeast of Galilee. 

High priests Annas and Caiaphas both were later involved in Jesus’ condemnation to the cross. 

The gospel today gives us one emperor, a governor, three tetrarchs, and two religious high priests, quite a list of supposedly important people in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of politics, but the word of God does not come to them. It comes to a relatively unknown man living in the wilderness who wears animal skins and eats locusts. God does not necessarily use the well-known, not the rich, not the powerful, to be his messenger, to do his bidding. God uses you and me, not the most prominent or popular. If your life is grounded in prayer, if you are all about faith, hope and charity in action, God will use you. 

Welcome to the second Sunday of Advent. It’s time to spiritually prepare. It’s time to straighten up. It’s time to make our crooked roads of life straight. It’s time to smooth out the bumps in our lives. 

It’s Advent, from the Latin Adventus, the coming. Jesus our King, our Master is on his way. And for us it’s a time to prepare to receive him. It’s time for soul-searching, for reviewing our attitudes toward others, especially toward the poor and the lowly. It’s a time take stock of who we are, where we come up short, how we act, especially how we act when things don’t go our way, how we act when we’re frustrated, how we respond when when we’re angry at someone. It’s time to clean up our attitudes and refocus ourselves and see the light of Christian humility. 

In olden days when a King, a ruler was going to a town or a district in his kingdom, the standard was for a herald to visit that community and announce that the King was soon to come. And that caused great hustle and bustle. He would go around the city or district, go before the leaders telling them all to clean up the city, fix the streets, smooth out the bumps, pick up the trash, clean up the horse and donkey droppings. There would be nothing more horrible for the king to arrive and the city was in a shoddy and stinking mess. Punishment would await the citizenry for their lackadaisical, lazy and disrespectful attitudes toward their ruler. Their city had to be fit for a king. 

Is our city, that is, our souls, us, who we are...are we fit to receive our King and Lord both later this month and when it’s our time to meet him on the completion of our earthly life? For this Advent season, let us all emulate John the Baptist and 
wrap ourselves in his biblical personality. 

John wore animal skins, ate locusts. Let’s see that as metaphors for our lives. John chose to be lowly, to be humble in his animal skins, in his diet of bugs. Let us make that same choice and clothe ourselves in the skins of humility. It’s time to eschew self-exultation, to be modest and unpretentious. 

Advent is the season of personal austerity, that is to be plain, to be simple, to have spiritual courage and engage in total prayer, to make our Advent a constant prayer in all we do, in all we say. And we will recognize that Father Son and Holy Spirit will be nearer to us than we to ourselves. 

In Advent we purify our souls by a new interior conversion to the will of God. Through our proper Advent attitude of prayer and humility we prepare ourselves to receive the special divine graces that Jesus is bringing. 

This is how we level our mountains, how we fill our valleys and how we make our paths straight … for the Lord…our True Friend and Savior.