The season of Advent is the perfect time of soul searching and spiritual reflection. We take a long look at our relationship with God and ask the honest questions, “How’s my prayer life? If Jesus were to come back today, am I ready to stand in judgment before him? Do I live this faith in all its fullness? In what ways have I let worldly desires get in the way of what truly matters?” During this time of year, I cannot help but look back at my life with the Lord. Even though I was baptized Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday with my family, it took a profound conversion experience at the age of eighteen to wake me from my spiritual coma. Jesus became a living, breathing, resurrected reality. How could I not make him the center of my life? It’s been twenty years since I began to live my Catholic with passion. Like anyone else, it hasn’t always been easy or saintly. But if there is one word to sum up the difference between my life before my conversion to now is freedom. There is a beautiful freedom when we live in Christ Jesus. This is what he offers humanity and to each one of us: true, lasting, and spectacular freedom! I am no longer chained to other’s people’s opinions about me. My identity is not bound with how much money I have, or how I look, or what car I drive. Nor am I defined by my failings and sins. My deepest worth is rooted in my identity as a beloved son of the Father, washed clean through the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, and made radiant in the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is precisely this freedom in Christ that St. John the Baptist preaches about in our Gospel reading for this Second Sunday of Advent. While standing in the middle of the “wilderness”, he screams out “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For the first century Jew, that detail of St. John being in the “wilderness” would have immediately conjured images from the Book of Exodus. If you recall, that book dealt with the story of Moses leading the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promise Land. According to the prophets, God in the future will perform a new exodus, again freeing his people once more. The fact that St. John is not only in the “wilderness”, but also as the Gospel recounts, the people “went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region about the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” “(See Matthew 3:1-12). He’s not simply at a random river baptizing, but he’s precisely at the Jordan River. This is absolutely significant. Dr. Brant Pitre, writes “[St. John the Baptist] goes out to the river Jordan, because, if you remember in the Old Testament, the book of Joshua 4–5, the old Exodus, the first Exodus, ends at the river Jordan when the Israelites miraculously crossed through the waters of the river Jordan and enter into the promised land. So what John the Baptist does is he goes back to the place where the first Exodus ended and he says the new exodus is now going to begin.” The connection is clear. This Jesus which St. John the Baptist preaches about is God’s fulfillment of the promise. Just as God freed the Jews from slavery all those years ago, he will now free all of humanity from enslavement to sin, death, and suffering. Freedom!