Compared to some of his other colorful invectives, John the Baptist seems pretty tame today. Scratch the surface, though, and he really isn’t. John is showing us an important truth about Christ’s coming. “With John the Baptist, the Holy Spirit begins the restoration to man of the divine likeness, prefiguring what he would achieve with and in Christ. John‘s baptism was for repentance; baptism in water and the Spirit will be a new birth” (CCC 720). “The restoration to man of the divine likeness.” Tomorrow, we will celebrate the Solemnity of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, and we will read from the book of Genesis about the fall, about how sin entered human nature with original sin. Our Blessed Mother was preserved from this original sin, but we were not. We bear the scars of Adam and Eve’s betrayal of God’s promise. Because of original sin, until the coming of Christ, all of humanity was under the dominion of Satan (remember: the people who strive to rise up, but can’t without Her Son whom She brings). We were still created in the image and likeness of God, but that likeness was marred, like a person who has experienced severe burns and now become unrecognizable.

John’s baptism was not the sacrament of baptism – it was a sign of repentance, of desire to change for the better. But it was pointing in the right direction. John’s ministry shows us what Christ’s coming was really about: restoring human nature, almost unrecognizably scarred by Adam’s sin, to being once more like Him. This is not just high theology. It is a mystery that each of us is called to contemplate: that Christ became man in Bethlehem of Judea to restore you and me to being like Him. This means that Christ’s Incarnation, which we are preparing to celebrate in this Advent season, is not just a mystery to provoke awe and wonder. It is something that ought to change our lives and leave us different than we were before, like those who began to follow John the Baptist after receiving his baptism of repentance.

Thus, we are seeking our own restoration to Christ’s likeness. Having been restored to God’s image and likeness, we rejoice in resembling Him by our souls having been conformed to Him by Baptism. However, unlike in our Immaculate Mother, who never had original sin in the first place, the fact that we did at one time bear the mark of the sin of Adam means that our human nature suffers the effects of original sin (called concupiscence). “Concupiscence” means that we have disordered desires. We seek after things that are good, but in the wrong ways, which leaves us wounded by our own sins. The divine likeness in our souls is not so marred by sin as to be unrecognizable, but it is frequently obscured. Christ will come at Christmas – in just over two weeks! – to restore His image in our souls, to make us resemble Him again. But the work of His redemption can only take hold in our souls if we are ready.

We hear from the prophet Isaiah that “every valley shall be filled and every mountain shall be made low,” so that a highway can be prepared for the coming of the Lord. It’s not something that we see in Indiana, but I bet you have had the experience of driving through the mountains. Some people marvel at the scenery, but if you’re one of those people with “engineer brain,” you might have marveled at the incredible feats of engineering that make it possible to cross the mountains at 75 miles per hour.

Here’s the thing: No one lowers a mountain or fills in a valley to build a road. Occasionally they will blast a tunnel through a mountain, but nothing more. And this is what you do with sin in your life. You carefully construct a bridge around it, you make a strategic tunnel to avoid it, but you generally try to leave things alone as much as possible.

But that isn’t the life that Christ desires for you! He wants to set you free, to flatten the mountains and fill in the valleys that would keep you from Him. He wants to obliterate all obstacles that would keep you apart.

          This is what happens, mysteriously, hidden under sacramental signs, in Baptism, and also in the Sacrament of Penance, Confession. Going to confession is not always easy, especially if it has been a while, especially if you’ve been holding back, making the mountains even higher and the valleys even deeper with sacrilegious confessions and communions due to unconfessed mortal sins.

          “Every valley shall be filled and every mountain shall be made low.” Isaiah is talking about a lot of explosives. He is talking about something painful.

          In the Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis tells us about an insufferable brat of a boy: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” At one point in the adventure, Eustace discovers a dragon’s horde of treasure, slips a golden bracelet on his leg, and gets turned into a dragon. At first, Eustace is excited to be the biggest thing around, but he quickly realizes he is cut off from his friends, and all of humanity, and he feels a weight of loneliness and desperately wants to change.

          That night, the Lion Aslan, a stand in for Christ in the stories, comes to Eustace and leads him to a large well “like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it.” He says the water was so clear, and he thought if he could get in there it might make him a boy again. But Aslan told him he had to undress first. As a dragon, Eustace has sharp claws, but no matter how many layers of dragon skin he peeled off himself, he was still a dragon. Eustace tells us: “Then the lion said, … ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. … Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off … And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that … I’d turned into a boy again…” (C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

How often have you been like Eustace, trying to pull those layers off yourself, but not succeeding, never really changing, because your dragon claws don’t go deep enough, because you’re not willing to inflict the pain that real conversion takes. “You will have to let me undress you.”

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.” If you’ve never felt like that before, you might be like St. Therese of Lisieux, whose confessor confirmed that she never committed a single mortal sin in her entire life. Or you might have made too many bridges over the valleys that ought to be filled, too many tunnels through the mountains that ought to be dynamited down – not yet let the Lion stick his claws right down into your heart.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

8 December, A.D. MMXXIV