Awaiting the Word of the Lord, On Multiple Levels
by Paulist Fr. Rich Andre
December 5, 2016

Editor’s Note: Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily for the Second Sunday of Advent (Year A) on December 3 and 4, 2016, at St. Austin Parish in Austin, TX.  It is based on the day’s scripture readings:  Isaiah 11: 1-10, Psalm 72, Romans 15: 4-9 and Matthew 3: 1-12.



Advent is the season of hope.

Our first reading today is an extremely well-known passage from Isaiah, foretelling the coming of the LORD.  It speaks of great peace:  

“The wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

the calf and the young lion shall browse together.”

It speaks of great peace, but it also sounds like a physical impossibility.  It’s the nature of wolves to eat lambs, the nature of lions to attack calves.

But Advent is a season of hope.  We have hopes for peace.  We have hopes for what seems to be impossible.  What are you hoping for this Advent season?  

Let us take one minute of silence to reflect on our hopes for this Advent season.  

O house of Jacob, come!  Let us walk in the light of the Lord!


Shortly after becoming a priest, I heard Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz’s MASS for the first time. Soon, I had the idea that I should sing one particular song from the piece as part of a homily, and that the most appropriate day of the liturgical year would be the Second Sunday of Advent. Don’t worry: after more reflection, I decided that the song was much too complicated. However, I am going to share some of the lyrics as we go through this homily.

But first, we have some heavy theology to attend to. Let’s talk about what we mean when we say the name “Jesus Christ.” Most of us here are familiar with talking about Jesus of Nazareth. He was a Jewish man born in Bethlehem roughly 2,000 years ago, who worked as a carpenter but eventually at the age of roughly 30 years began to teach about a new way to understand God’s plan for the salvation of the world. He was eventually crucified by the Roman authorities. We Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Son of God and that he rose from the dead.

But who is Christ? Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Christ is the entirety of the second person of the Holy Trinity. When God the Father created the world, he created it through his Word, “Let there be light.” We believe that very Word, before the dawn of creation, is Christ. It created us as human beings. Or in the words of Stephen Schwartz:

[T]he Word, for the Word was at the birth of the beginning.
It made the heavens and the earth and set them spinning,
…[T]he word, for the Word created mud, and got it going.
It filled our empty brains with blood, and set it flowing.

That Word, Christ, is “The Word of the LORD” that we proclaim in all our scripture readings at Mass, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. But that’s not all. St. Ireneaus explained that God has a plan for how all of creation will be reconciled at the end of time. That plan, said Ireneaus, is Christ. Despite our sinfulness, despite our attempts to delay the coming of the LORD, despite our claims that the very concept of “God” is an old-fashioned myth, God’s plan for salvation moves forward. Or, to quote Schwartz,

[F]or several million years, 
[the Word] has withstood all our “forums” and “fine ideas.”
It’s been rough, it’s been rough, but it appears to be growing!
It’s been rough, it’s been rough, but it appears to be winning!

Jesus the Christ is the King of the Universe, the Son of God, and God’s plan for the salvation of the world. But during Advent and Christmas, we seem to forget about all that. When we speak of Jesus as “the Word made flesh,” most of us seem to envision a cute, harmless baby. But that Word of “the Word made flesh” is the most powerful force in the universe.

There are people who doubt it.
There are people who doubt it, and shout it out loud!
There are local, vocal yokels who we know collect a crowd.
They can fashion a rebuttal that is as subtle as a sword,
but they’re never gonna scuttle the Word of the LORD.
NO! They’re never gonna scuttle the Word of the LORD!

It’s been said that the season of Advent can be summarized in eight words, two words for each week:

Wake up!

Straighten up!

Cheer up!

Hurry up!

As we hear the words of John the Baptist this weekend, it’s pretty clear that we’re in the “straighten up” week. “Even now, the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”  

I have had the privilege to celebrate Mass with some people whom many in society would say produce rotten fruit: men in jail. That was not my experience at all. The guys housed in the maximum security pod of the Knox County Detention Center seemed to understand the concept of Advent better than anyone else I know. These were guys who, for truly tragic reasons, had experienced the ax lying at the root of the trees. But they’d heard John the Baptist’s message to repent. These guys found God in the prison. They continually read the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. They didn’t know what the future held for them, but they were committed to finding ways to bear good fruit for themselves and for others.

Some of the New Testament was written in prisons. In fact, when we light the pink candle on the wreath next week as a sign of rejoicing, we’ll be thinking of a command written by St. Paul to the Philippians while he was in jail: “Rejoice in the LORD always! I shall say it again, rejoice!”

You can lock up the bold men.
Go, and lock up your bold men, and hold them in tow.
You can stifle all adventure, for a century or so.
Smother hope before it’s risen, watch it wizen like a gourd.
But you cannot imprison the Word of the LORD.
No, you cannot imprison the Word of the LORD.

How about the rest of us? Surely the ax is not at the root of our trees, or is it? I think we’re a lot like the Pharisees and the Sadducees to whom John was speaking. They were the experts, the scholars of the Torah. Here we are across the street from a university campus, and many of the people in this room are professors, researchers, and aspiring scholars.  

All you big men of merit, all you big men of merit who ferret out flaws:
You rely on… compliance with your science and your laws.
Find the freedom to demolish while you polish some award,
but you cannot abolish the Word of the LORD.
No!  You cannot abolish the WORD of the LORD.

And when Jesus criticizes what the Pharisees wear, who do you know that looks the most like one of them? [Look down at my vestments, especially the stole.] And even those of us in the room who are struggling with college debts, most of us have a lot of control over our destiny. We like to think that we’re producing “good fruit” – but is it fruit for the kingdom of God, or is it fruit to guarantee our own position, comfort, and prosperity? The Word of the LORD is powerful beyond our imagining. It is far more powerful than any of us, even if we delude ourselves into thinking that the goal of life is to become independent of needing anyone else.

All you people of power, all you people of power, your hour is now.
You may plan to rule forever, but you never do, somehow!

If we think that the goal of life is to control our own destiny, it sounds as if we’ll never be ready to allow a little child to guide us.

And so we wait, in silent treason, until reason is restored.
And we wait for the season of the Word of the LORD.
We await the season of the Word of the LORD.
We wait, we wait for the Word…of the LORD.


“The Word of the Lord” from MASS by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz

performed by Alan Titus, Leonard Bernstein (conductor), Norman Scribner Choir