Dry, Barren, Lifeless Series

Title: Dry, Barren, Lifeless

Intro: It is a daily, ongoing, sometimes painful process of letting God strip away everything false in us until what remains is authentic, real, and true.

Scripture: Matthew 3:1-12

Reflection

My dear friends, I need to tell you about the day I almost gave up on everything. It was the first year into my seminary, and I was standing in my room staring at my rosary, wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. The church felt empty. My prayers felt hollow. I was going through the motions, saying the right words, performing the rituals, but inside I was a desert. Dry. Barren. Lifeless. I remember whispering into the silence, “God, if you are real, I need to hear something. Anything. Because right now, all I hear is nothing.”

That is when I first truly understood John the Baptist. Not the John of stained glass windows and religious paintings. Not the John reduced to a supporting character in Jesus’s story. But the real John—wild, uncomfortable, urgent—standing in the desert and crying out, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2).

The desert. Let us start there. Because John did not set up his ministry in the Temple in Jerusalem. He did not wait for an official appointment or ecclesiastical approval. He went to the wilderness, to the place where there is nothing but sand and sun and silence. And people went out to him. Matthew tells us that “people went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan” (Matthew 3:5). Think about that. They left their comfortable homes, their daily routines, and their familiar surroundings and walked into the barren wilderness to hear a man dressed in camel’s hair eating locusts and wild honey.

Why? What were they looking for? What are we looking for when we come to church on Sunday morning, when we bow our heads in prayer, when we open these sacred scriptures? I think we are all looking for the same thing those ancient people sought. We are looking for truth. We are looking for something real in a world full of pretence. We are looking for a voice that does not flatter us or manipulate us but tells us what we need to hear, even when it hurts.

Last month, a young woman came to confession. She was twenty-seven, successful, educated, and engaged to be married. On the surface, her life looked perfect. But she sat across from me and said, “Father, I feel like I am dying inside. I post smiling photos on Instagram. I tell everyone I am blessed. But I wake up every morning feeling empty. I go through my day like an actor playing a role. Who am I really? Does anyone know? Do I even know?”

This is the cry of our generation. We are so good at maintaining appearances. We curate our images on social media. We present the version of ourselves we think others want to see. We perform happiness, perform success, and perform spirituality. But inside, so many of us are deserts. Dry. Thirsty. Desperate for something real.

John the Baptist did not perform. He did not try to make people comfortable. He did not soften his message to avoid offending anyone. He stood in that wilderness and said what needed to be said: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:7-8).

Harsh words. Uncomfortable words. The kind of words that make us squirm in our seats. He was speaking to the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious elite, the ones who prided themselves on being children of Abraham. And John basically said, “Your pedigree means nothing. Your religious credentials mean nothing. God does not need your ancestry. God can raise up children of Abraham from these stones” (Matthew 3:9).

This cuts deep, doesn’t it? Because we all have our versions of “being children of Abraham”. We say, “I come from a good Catholic family. My grandfather built this church. I never miss Sunday Mass. I have been baptised, confirmed, and married here.” Or we say, “I am a good person. I do not lie, I do not steal, and I help the poor.” We create these identities, these spiritual resumes, thinking they guarantee our place in God’s kingdom.

But John says no. What matters is not who you were born as or what rituals you have performed or how respectable you appear. What matters is the fruit. What matters is the transformation. What matters is whether your life is actually changing, whether you are becoming more loving, more merciful, more just, more honest, more fully human.

I think of my own father. He was not a religious man in the conventional sense. He did not quote scripture or attend daily Mass. But I watched him share his meal with the beggar who sat outside his workplace every single day for twenty years. I watched him pay school fees for children in our neighbourhood whose parents could not afford them. I watched him stay up all night with a sick neighbour whose family was out of town. He did not announce these things. He did not post them online. He just lived them. That is fruit. That is what John was talking about.