Today’s readings draw heavily on those familiar images of filling valleys and leveling mountains, making straight roads in the wilderness (Bar 5:1-9).
If you’ve been on a road trip and seen a major highway, bridge, or railway under construction you will know the scale of that sort of project. It’s pretty awe inspiring. The ancient Israelites didn’t have the same heavy engineering equipment but ancient societies were no strangers to massive engineering works, whether it be the pyramids, Stonehenge, or Mayan temples. I’m sure the grandeur of the imagery used by Baruch and Isaiah would have resonated for those people, and the sense of pride and achievement of a people returning to their homeland after many years of displacement, of being refugees forced to a foreign land.
So this is the image we bring to our Advent readings today. The grandeur of God marching out over the landscape.
What then is John the Baptist doing with this image? There is no triumphal march, bathed in glory, here (Lk 3:1-6). John is preaching a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. He’s not talking about some impressive activity going on out there, something we look out on like the launch of a moon rocket, and think “wow, that’s cool, that’s an achievement”.
What are the valleys and hills that John is talking about? They aren’t anywhere out there, they are something inside. The paths through the wilderness that are to be straightened aren’t on some surveyor’s map in some remote wilderness, they are inside us.
John has taken this imagery of impressive landscapes and huge engineering works and turned it inside out. He’s asking people (us) to look not at the great achievements of our societies but to the hard work of reengineering ourselves. Preparing the way of the Lord, so that everyone can see the salvation of God, can see how He changes everything – that’s not a change of anything outside. It’s a change of everything inside.
Are we prepared to do that hard work of changing ourselves, so that everyone can see what a difference God can make, so that when people look at us they will see the level ground and the clear pathways, so they will see “the salvation of our God”. The only place people are going to see that is in us, it isn’t anywhere else.