Today John the Baptist bursts onto the Advent scene. In Mark’s Gospel, where there is no nativity narrative, we are reminded at once of Isaiah’s prophecy about the messenger who will come to prepare a way in the wilderness, a messenger who is a voice crying out to us – crying out to you and to me – to make straight the pathway of the Lord. And this messenger, of course, is John.

What a strange figure he cut, clothed in camels’ skin and a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey, while proclaiming that someone was coming after him who was mightier than him. He was only the messenger proclaiming the one who would follow him, Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh. He was merely the voice.
That interplay of voice and word is expressed powerfully by St Augustine in one of his sermons. He describes what is happening when we communicate. ‘Wanting the word, which is already in my heart,’ he explains, ‘to come over to you, and make its way into your heart, I make use of my voice to talk to you. The sound of the voice brings you to understand the word.’ Then listen to what he says: ‘And when my voice has done this, it ceases; but the word carried to you by the sound is now already in your heart, and has not left mine.’ Augustine is echoing and expressing the Baptist’s remark, not in today’s Gospel, but in St John’s: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3:30). The voice ceases, but the word remains.

Advent, like Lent when we prepare for Easter, is also a time of preparation, a time indeed when we are called to examine ourselves. Bishop Erik Varden, the former Abbot of Mount St Bernard’s Abbey and now the Bishop of Trondheim in Norway, was invited by Pope Leo to preach the Lenten retreat to the Roman Curia last Lent and posed some pointed questions to his retreatants which are as apt for our Advent self-examination as they were for Lent. ‘Am I coherent in my Christian endeavour?’ he asked, ‘Or do I, by choices I make, or fail to make, effectively sabotage the progress I claim to be pursuing? To put it differently, do I, conscious of my ill health, want to be healed?’ How are we to prepare ourselves to celebrate once more the birth of Jesus, the coming into our midst of the Word made flesh?

Isaiah offers us the image of a highway made straight in the desert where ‘every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain’. Filling valleys and flattening hills is an arresting image. What are we to make of it?

Perhaps we should understand these words not as referring to some physical landscape, an improbable engineering project, but to a landscape within. As we examine ourselves at this time, where are the hills and valleys in our hearts? Where is the uneven ground? Where are the rough places? Are we hiding in the hills or skulking in the valleys? Are we content to travel on uneven ground and rough roads because navigating them provides us with distractions, helping us to avoid our responsibilities? So the image can be seen as something personal, a call to repentance, personal conversion. We have to prepare the way of the Lord in our own hearts and that can be demanding.

Peter Steele, an Australian Jesuit, has related that, while driving in Ireland in 1977, he stopped for a pub lunch. A man came in who had been working on the road outside the pub and wanted to buy him a drink. Peter could afford the hospitality far more easily than his new companion, but the man insisted. He was a model of generosity. Remembering this man years later, prompted Peter to think about repentance. ‘When you are mending roads,’ he remarked, ‘you rip up a good deal before you smooth them out: the smoothing won’t be much good without the ripping.’ And he observed that that was what the Baptist was doing, ripping open the hearts of those listening to him so that they might become better people.

As we prepare for Christmas, how might we ‘rip open our hearts’ in order to explore better the hills and valleys inside us in which we may be tempted to hide? How might we serve better those who are in need?