Last Sunday I mentioned that the Season of Advent has two great interconnected themes: expectation and preparation.
Liturgically, Advent is a time of looking forward to the birth of Christ at Christmas, and the four weeks of the Advent Season create a mood of moving towards, and building up to, that event. Many of the scripture readings during Advent convey the sense of longing for the arrival of the Messiah which gripped the people of Israel and Judah at the time of Christ.
This Sunday's readings reflect that sense of longing. Specifically, many of the Chosen People were waiting and hoping for a new King David figure. He would emerge from the "stock of Jesse" - Jesse had been David's father, the "founder" of the House of David - and he would achieve two things: he would liberate the people from foreign occupation, and he would restore Israel's lost glories.
Israel had never been a superpower or a great empire, but by the time of Jesus it had certainly seen better days. Many of the Jewish people tended to look back wistfully to those days and yearned for a leader who would give them back their independence and their sense of national pride. Their idea of the Messiah was the idea of a great political and military leader.
When Christ came, of course, he didn't conform to this worldly image of the Messiah, and for many people he must have proved a disappointment. Christ didn't take any of the steps that would have made him a leader in worldly terms. He didn't amass great wealth; he didn't pursue political power; he didn't try to place himself at the head of a military campaign to oust the Romans.
As he said himself on more than one occasion, he represented a Kingdom of a very different kind - God's Kingdom. This was the metaphor that Christ used over and over again during his ministry to put his message of salvation across.
Restoring national pride and conquering enemies in war had nothing to do with it. God's Kingdom is much more about spiritual and moral conversion of life; it's about following Christ's own example of rejecting the worldly values of money and power and violence; it's about entering into communion of life with God.
This is where John the Baptist, in today's gospel reading, comes in. John's life-purpose was to be the herald of the Messiah and the herald of God's Kingdom.
Again, the people of the time believed that before the new King David appeared, a new Elijah figure would also appear - and this was the role that John took up.
John's language was fierce and harsh and menacing. He seems mainly to anticipate God's judgement, a time of "retribution" when the Messiah will arrive with a winnowing-fan in his hand to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is prophetic proclamation from a prophetic character.
What's interesting about John's preaching is that he also contradicts some of the notions that people held about the Messiah and what the Messiah's mission would consist of. He gives no comfort to people who see God's Kingdom in terms of national, racial or religious identity - the idea some people had that since "we have Abraham as our father" we can automatically bask in God's favour.
John scornfully dismisses this self-serving notion. Like Jesus after him, John identifies membership of God's Kingdom far more in terms of the spiritual and moral qualities we realise in our lives, and how far our attitudes and behaviour reflect God's holiness, justice, truth and love.
So if there's a particular lesson in this Sunday's readings for us, now, it's the lesson that the people of John's and Jesus' time learned from them: not to mislead ourselves with our own, often self-congratulatory, ideas of God and the Messiah and the Kingdom, but to acquaint ourselves with the reality instead, and make it the centre of our lives. That's the only preparation for God's coming that matters.
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