“‘But what is this darkness?  What do you call it?  What is its name?’  The only name it has is ‘potential receptivity’, which certainly does not lack being nor is it deficient, but it is the potential of receptivity in which you will be perfected” (Sermons & Treatises, p.41).  These words of Meister Eckhart aptly speak of the interior landscape, the place where this Divine birth is to happen, the place of God’s new incarnation.  With this Second Sunday of Advent, we have the voice of John the Baptist speaking within the landscape of the soul: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.  John also cries out: ‘Repent’:  change your ways, change your attitude, your mindset, your rigid, narrow perspective, your harsh judgements. 

How would we describe who Jesus is?  And for more perspective: How does Jesus exercise authority in his ministry?  The gospels themselves are revelatory and reflect the type of ‘king’ Jesus is.  One’s normal understanding of ‘king’ is turned upside down, inside out in applying this title to Jesus.  Who Jesus is gives us a stunning contrast, which is wholly other than what or who a ‘king’ normally is.

We just celebrated All Saints.  It is a profound solemnity of the Church.  Each year our first Vespers opens the solemnity of All Saints with this amazing text from St. Symeon the New Theologian: “The saints in each generation, joined together to those who have gone before and filled them with light, become a golden chain, in which each saint is a separate link, united to the next by faith and works and love. 

The gospel for this Sunday is uplifting as we behold the gift of salvation in the encounter of Zacchaeus with Jesus (Lk 19:1-10).  To see, in order to see Jesus, Zacchaeus, who is short, and because of the crowd, climbs a sycamore tree.  There is a deeper intention that moves him to such an action, one where he makes himself vulnerable to collective, judgmental voices such as ‘what a fool’…‘a tax collector, what is he doing here’?  Zacchaeus will not be stopped; his heart has opened, if ever so small, there is an opening, a beginning. Grace is working in him as he seeks out Jesus.

In the gospel of today Jesus tells the story of two men who went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the upholder of the law, and the other a tax collector (Lk 18:9-14).  The prayer of one is received by God, the other is not.  One goes inward and puts his glance on himself, on his own conversion; the other looks at his neighbor, he does not go inward.