There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light. … They said to him then, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, `Make straight the way of the Lord.’”

John I:6-28

The calendar is forever cheating us with false pserpectives. In the Sunday Gospels of Advent, so much stress is laid on the position of John the Baptist that we imagine him, in the back of our minds, as preaching already beyond the Jordan when the shepherds found their way to Bethlehem — Actually, he was only a child six months old. So short an interval was there between the world’s repentence and the world’s redemption.

What we are meant to see, dramatically, is the world at its best, not at its worst, when Christ came. The Baptist’s mission crowned, apparently, with success; all the social inequalities of the age being ironed out; food and clothing shared equally between rich and poor; taxes no longer exorbitant; public justice no longer tyrannous. … All that is the picture that emerges from St. Luke, a Utopia in the making. And the man who has so gripped the public consciece is not satisfied for a moment — All this is only a beginning, only a preparation for something higher yet, the Kingdom of Grace. To be content with this is to mistake shadow for reality.

Christ did not come into a self-satisfied world. The public conscience which responded, in Judea, to the Baptist’s appeal is reflected at Rome, at the very heart of things, by the campaign of the Emperor Augustus for a reform of morals. It is reflected in the State-inspired literature of the day, a passionate sighing for the primitive virtues. … In a world torn by civil wars for more than a century, people were longing for a clean slate.

Because they thought all was well with them, after John the Baptist’s purge, a multitude of his hearers missed the hour of grace. He had warned them, but they could not see it. A point to be remembered when so many of us are so deeply concerned to providing a clean-up of public morals, or of our own, with grace left out.