19/12/2025

Friday Week 3 Advent

It is possible for me and every other soul on earth to live without sin. Sometimes this has nearly happened but it seems that God's will for a sinless creation has never materialized in the human reality of time on earth.

My experience of living my own life has largely been one of trying to face up to the consequences of what I know to have been my own, my personal sins. I know that they are my own because although I knew that they were being done in opposition to the will of Our Father I still did them and then panicked overcome by the fear of retribution.

This concept of a fear-driven relationship with an all-knowing, all-powerful "God" is what those who today reject God and his revelations even to the extent of today claiming to be able to choose to become either man or woman is the basic lie on which the "Father of lies" has always built his case against God. It was thus in the Garden and has ever been so.

During the thousands of years when God confined his revelations only to the Jews in the Old Testament there were many "Heroes" who displayed during their lifetimes seemingly super-human qualities that expressed their total commitment to IAMIAM, the LORD whose will they accepted as their own.

Samson is today's example. And appropriately so for it is in long suffering Gaza that he dies in agony.

There were also Prophets whose faith had been acknowledged by the insights with which they proclaimed the Eternal WORD.

Today John the Baptist is identified with Elijah.

In the person of John the Baptist the functions of hero and prophet are combined and concluded. With his martyrdom the Old Testament has officially ended for he has seen the ONE whose shoe he is not fit to undo and at the Baptism of Jesus it is made quite clear that with Jesus  there is "Something greater here".

The "learned and the clever" have always been able to contemptuously tell me that my "fear-driven" childhood prayers for forgiveness of sin are simplistic and not worthy of the humanity that can display the intelligence of a Plato or an Einstein and especially their own.

Our Faith, however, is in Jesus the Resurrection who taught us to acknowledge supreme reality with the child-like love expressed in the Aramaic, "Abba" and by knowing that during our lives we all can have a place in the secure reality of the New Holy Family he created as, humanly heroic as was Samson, he completed the WORD with the Sacrificial Death on the Cross that gives meaning to Life on Earth.