Living with a Siberian Husky, one is forced to study its behavior. Among its many eccentric ways of communicating and showing that it is attentive to its surroundings is its vivid way of trying to focus on what stimulates its senses. Its head and eyes move from one object to another as though it has an existential obligation to grasp the essence of the objects that it has fixated its gaze on. In a similar manner, reading through the texts for the third Sunday of Advent, one is forced to ask the question, how can one make a link between the motif of desert that is beautifully captured in the reading from Isaiah (35:1–6a, 10), where the desert is presented in a disruptive manner that goes against the very experience of humans who know what the desert tends to be like, and the Gospel reading from Matthew (11:2–11), where the content of discipleship in Christ is extended to the epiphanic power that the desert exudes, especially in and through the ministry of John the Baptist. In this brief reflection, I intend to demonstrate the link that can be made between these two seemingly different foci of the respective texts. To do this well, I will appropriate two modes of knowing, sense-making and meaning-making.
Those familiar with the terrain of a desert are reminded of the harshness of the terrain. Everything is in the extreme. It is too dry. It is too hot during the day. It is too windy. It is too cold at night. Nothing seems to be in moderation. What I have described here is in the domain of sense-making. Sense-making is all about looking backward and comparing one’s current experience with that which has happened in the past and whose meaning has been “settled” as such. It involves comparing and finding the familiar contours in the current experience. When one sees the contours and connects the past meaning to the current experience, the current experience is thus categorized.
Sense-making looks backward for familiarity; meaning-making opens forward into mystery. Advent faith begins where the familiar world reaches its limits and the human imagination is invited to trust God beyond what it already knows.”
With this in mind, Jesus poses a question to the crowd while validating the ministry of John the Baptist, “What did you go out to the desert to see?” As usual, he points to their sense-making world by alluding to what is to be expected – “a reed swayed by the wind?” He even reminds them of their natural intention, driven by curiosity: they want to encounter a prophet who has renounced the pleasures of life and dedicated his life to God. Having said these, Jesus deploys that which is beyond the sense-making world, an orientation to a meaning-making world.
Meaning-making is all about an orientation towards a new horizon where the familiar world has its limits. At the boundary of limitations, a new world opens, one that the old language cannot describe. It is a world where old referential markers are redundant; where all that can be said to be its defining markers are in proximity to that which is in the domain of the familiar and yet makes limitation as the grounds for the instantiation of unknowing. What do I mean by this? The hermeneutic boundaries of the familiar world, understood through sense-making, give way to the unfamiliar world that can only be encountered through a turn to meaning-making.
Meaning-making is all about openness to new experiences, made possible by the Holy Spirit, who is the energy of renewal and new imagination. The Spirit, who is the source of the transformative language of life, is the one to whom those who embrace the meaning-making experience must turn. This said, Jesus reminds his audience that John the Baptist, who lives in the desert, transcends the world of sense-making. He is a forerunner of a new reality, a new vision, a new life, a new humanity unfolding in the world, beginning with the crowd who encounter him.
Meaning-making calls believers to dwell at the edge of what they know, where old language fails and new imagination becomes possible. It is here, at the limits of control and familiarity, that the Holy Spirit opens a new horizon—one where discipleship is no longer defined by certainty, but by trust in God’s promise of renewal, transformation, and surprising abundance.”
The Prophet Isaiah, like all prophets of God, embodies a voice that calls all to embrace a meaning-making world where new beginnings, new insights, new humanity, new social logic, and new identities can be realized. Thus, he goes on to describe the desert by upending its sense-making content. The familiar vision of the desert must now give way to the unfamiliar. In the desert, the place where the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist, would one day call his home as he ministers to God’s people, abundance shall define its content. Flowers will bloom in abundance. The luscious gardens of Lebanon will define the desert. Where fear used to shape the lives of those who live in the desert, courage will now be the reality. Where the dusty environment used to cause blindness, sight will now become a reality. All that define marginalities as the desert used to be known for will now give way to abundance, inclusion, and joyfulness.
Thus, the connection of John the Baptist to the ministry and life of Jesus Christ speaks to God’s connection with all who suffer in the world of marginalities that have been created by the powers of evil in the world. Those who suffer in such a world will be made whole in a new way that transcends the familiar world of sense-making. In the promise of God’s word uttered by Isaiah, the new reality that befalls God’s people can only be spoken of using the language of meaning-making. But such a language does not arise from human creation. It is a gift that only God can give.
Advent hope is not a return to what was lost; it is God’s gift of transcendence—a new world where healing does not mean going back, but being transformed beyond the logic of suffering.”
Jesus Christ is the content of that gift through which the new reality that Advent holds for all is to be spoken of in the new language of life. This truth may be difficult to embrace for all who have suffered tremendously in the hands of those who play God and who demand the idolization of the world of sense-making, where control and manipulation reign supreme. Yet, if one is to trust God, the readings of this third Sunday of Advent are God’s covenantal promise that the new world where God’s life and joy are in abundance is about to dawn upon all. Simply stated, Advent can be summarized in the following words from Isaiah – “Be strong, fear not!”
In the Spirit of Isaiah, those in Sudan who are suffering the senseless genocidal war; those in Palestine who are without a home of theirs; those in Russia and Ukraine who are caught up in Putin’s war; those in Israel who are held captive by the fear of their Palestinian neighbors as a result of a produced fear of the other; those in northern Nigeria who continue to suffer under the attack of bandits and Islamic religious fundamentalists; those in Venezuela who are uncertain as the United States uses its military might to intimidate their country, remember God’s promise to you and our world this Advent, “be strong, fear not!”