Daily Gospel Reflection
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December 5, 2021
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,
and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region
of Ituraea and Trachonitis,
and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene,
during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,
the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert.
John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,
as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah:
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.
Every valley shall be filled
and every mountain and hill shall be made low.
The winding roads shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Reflection
I admit I only have vague ideas where “Ituraea and Trachonitis” might have been and only a distant memory from university days of the people they describe. My modern imprecision doesn’t matter, but to the people of Jesus’ time, those names of people and places emphasized that John the Baptist was a real person in a specific time and place.
He received orders from God to prepare the way so that Jesus’ ministry of preaching, teaching, healing, dying, and eventually rising could touch the hearts of all those who experienced it.
That does mean something to me, and I hope to all of us. When we meet John the Baptist in the context of Mass, we are to hear these words not just as describing the past but as living words that affect how we live our faith today. How are we to be John the Baptist and smooth the way for Jesus to reach the people around us?
I live in a particular time and place—Phoenix, Arizona—with eight other semi-retired Holy Cross priests who are active in the local church.
In this snowless place, we become familiar with helmeted construction workers distributing innumerable orange cones, digging ditches, and reworking roads so often that getting to any one place is always a creative challenge. Which route this time? Will I get there in time? Sometimes we forget that all that digging, scraping, and re-digging will quite literally pave the way for us to do our own John the Baptist thing for Christ.
I love Advent because every year is an opportunity for each of us to learn what new way John the Baptist wants us to join him in smoothing the way for the Lord’s coming.
Prayer
Lord, life is full of peaks and valleys. As we continue this Advent journey, fill our depths with love for you, lower the mountains of self-doubt, unwind the tension stemming from unrealistic expectations, and smooth our inner dialogue to decrease its abrasiveness. Open us, Lord, to the healing of your forgiveness so we can prepare for your coming, for you live and reign forever and ever. Amen.
Saint of the Day
St. Galgano is the source of a real-life sword in the stone story.
He was born in Tuscany in 1148 and grew up to become a knight. He lived the rowdy life of a soldier, fighting and filling his senses with pleasures of the flesh.
One night, when he was 20 years old, he was visited by Michael the Archangel, who showed him a vision of the Lord flanked by the disciples on a nearby mountain. When he woke the next day and mounted his horse, it refused to go anywhere except to the nearby mountain that had appeared in Galgano’s dream. So he went there.
Accounts differ as to what happened next. In one version of his story, he was overcome with reverence and wanted to pray. Finding no cross to center his attention, he thrust his sword into the ground, where it fused with rock and formed a cross in its hilt.
In another version of his story, a voice called out to Galgano, urging him to give up his life of dissolution. Galgano replied that it was easier to split stone with a sword, and thrust his weapon into a rock to prove his point, expecting it to snap in half. To his shock, it entered the rock to its hilt, as though he were cutting butter, and became one with the stone.
In either case, the event resulted in Galgano taking up the prayerful and simple life of a hermit on that mountain top, and he became a sought-after voice of wisdom and spiritual insight. When he died in 1181 at the age of 33, a number of bishops and abbots attended his funeral, and he was canonized a saint just four years later. An abbey was built on the hilltop and around his sword.
St. Galgano’s sword remains on the mountain top today in Tuscany, surrounded by the ruins of the abbey that was built there. Recent studies have validated that the sword is not a modern fake—it is of a simple design that would have been common in the 12th century. Radar analysis shows a cavity beneath the sword, which may hold the saint’s body.
The story of King Arthur and Excalibur became popular in the decades after St. Galgano’s canonization, so some think that this saint's sword might have been the inspiration for that legend, though the influences are hard to trace. St. Galgano is depicted in today's featured image by Luigi Gregori, who was artist in residence at Notre Dame from 1874-1891, in an illustration that belongs to the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art on campus.
St. Galgano, you dedicated your life to the Lord in a dramatic conversion that involved a sword in a stone—pray for us!
Image Credit: Luigi Gregori (Italian, 1819-1896), Saint Galgano, n.d., black chalk on wove paper. Raclin Murphy Museum of Art: Gift of the Artist, AA2009.056.367.)