Make way the path of the Lord! John the Baptist spent his entire life saying that. From the moment he was first in the same room with him, he jumped for joy while in Elizabeth's womb. He spent his entire existence telling people, "You may think I'm great because I say lots of really amazing things, but you ain't seen nothing yet." I wonder if John had any interaction with Jesus when they were children. You would think they would being cousins and all. What were those times like? According to yesterday's gospel in the Catholic Church, (Matt 11: 2-11), I can only assume they were just like all other boys. John sent a message to Jesus from jail asking "Are you the one I've been crying out in the desert about or is there someone else coming?" That puzzles me a bit. Don't you think he would have known? Clearly Jesus didn't perform any public miracles until the wedding feast at Cana, so did he just act like a little boy? How did he react when John talked about his coming? Maybe John acted just like a little boy too. Maybe John wasn't moved to his ministry until he was an adult, but the whole leaping in the womb thing threw me off.
Either way, John had a mission. It was to tell everyone to prepare. Get ready. This is it. This is the big one. This is what we've all been waiting for! Make way. Make the paths straight, fill the valleys, make the mountains low. The visual I get from this is so appropriate. John was of course, speaking about our hearts - not the landscape. He wanted us to make it easy for the Lord to journey to us. He wanted us to remove all obstacles, all areas of sin, everything that would impede the Lord's way into our hearts.
Since it appears that John didn't know beforehand that his cousin Jesus was the Messiah, I wonder how it felt when he realized it was Him. Did he doink his forehead and say, "Duh, of COURSE it's Him! Now I see it." Think of how excited he must have been when it was revealed to him. Jesus! My cousin! HE's the one! Wow. How cool is that? God had great plans in store for John - he gave him the gift of speaking the truth - even when it was unpopular and would eventually get him beheaded. But he did his job very well. He led people to Jesus. He pointed the way to Jesus. He always focused on the coming of Jesus. If they did have interaction as children, I'll bet John's heart was always stirred when Jesus came. He just maybe didn't understand. But whatever happened, he realized that the greatest human being to ever walk the earth was here and he wanted everyone to know about it.
Imagine what it would be like if our hearts were stirred even a tiny bit as much as John's was. We'd be yelling from our rooftops that Jesus is coming! He's on his way! Symbolically, we believe His coming happens on Christmas day, but in our hearts, we have to remember that He's coming every day. He's here! He's here! During Advent, we need to prepare our hearts for that symbolic coming. We need to fill those valleys that sometimes run so deep we can't see the bottom. We need to remove those mountains that sometimes seem so high that we can't get over or around them. We need to make straight the way of the Lord so that He can enter our lives and our hearts without any impediment.
My prayer today is to be able to open my heart to God and feel the joy John must have felt the day he discovered that Jesus was the one. As the Jesse tree progresses to Christmas Eve, all of the stories are about Jesus. I hope that the next nine days are filled with wonder and expectation for the coming of the Lord.
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