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.
Repentance is not just feeling sorry for our sins. The Greek word is “metanoia”—it means a complete transformation of mind and heart. It means turning around, changing direction, and becoming a different person. It is not a one-time confession booth transaction. 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.
John baptised with water, and he told the people, “I baptise you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).
Water and fire. Both are purifying, but fire does something water cannot. Fire transforms. It burns away the dross, melts what is hard, and refines what is precious. When Jesus baptises us with the Holy Spirit and fire, He does not just wash us clean. He changes our very substance.
I saw this in my uncle. He was an angry man for most of his life. Bitter about disappointments, harsh with his children, quick to take offence. Then, at sixty-five, something shifted. He attended a retreat and encountered God in a way he never had before. It was not dramatic. No visions or voices. But he came back different. Softer. More patient. He began asking his children for forgiveness for the ways he had hurt them. He started volunteering at an orphanage. His eyes, which had always seemed hard, became gentle. The fire of the Holy Spirit had done its work.
This is what Advent is about, my friends. John appears at the beginning of Advent every year to wake us up, to shake us out of our spiritual sleepwalking. He comes to remind us that Christmas is not about decorations and gifts and holiday meals, though these things have their place. Christmas is about God breaking into our world, into our lives, into the deserts of our hearts.
But we have to be ready. We have to prepare the way. “Prepare the way for the Lord; make straight paths for him” (Matthew 3:3). What are the crooked paths in your life that need straightening? What are the valleys of despair that need filling? What are the mountains of pride that need levelling? What are the rough places of anger, resentment, addiction, dishonesty, and selfishness that need smoothing?
For me, that day three years ago when I stood in my room feeling hollow, the crooked path was my pride. I had convinced myself I needed to have all the answers, to project strength and certainty, to be the shepherd who never struggled. The desert experience taught me that my greatest strength would come from admitting my weakness, from allowing God to be God while I was simply human.
I went back to the basics. I stopped performing and started praying. Not the formal prayers of the breviary, though those matter. But real prayer. Desperate prayer. The kind where you tell God exactly what you feel, where you rage and weep and beg and thank and question. I started reading scripture not as a priest preparing a homily but as a thirsty man drinking water. And slowly, imperceptibly, the desert began to bloom.
Isaiah prophesied, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom” (Isaiah 35:1). This is God’s promise. The places in us that feel most dead are exactly where God wants to bring new life. The parts of us we are most ashamed of are where grace can work its greatest miracles.
John stood in the Jordan River, calling people into the water. Water in the desert is life itself. To be baptised was to die to the old self and rise to new possibility. Every time we make the sign of the cross, every time we bless ourselves with holy water, we are remembering that baptism. We are recommitting to that transformation. We are saying yes again to the life God offers.
My dear friends, as we move through this Advent season, I invite you to do what those ancient people did. Go to the desert. Not literally, perhaps, though that might help. But go to the desert places within yourself. Stop avoiding them. Stop covering them with busyness and noise and distraction. Sit in the silence. Listen. The desert has something to teach us. The emptiness has something to give us. Because it is only when we acknowledge how thirsty we are that we are ready to drink the living water Jesus offers.
John’s message is urgent because life is urgent. We do not have forever. “The axe is already at the root of the trees” (Matthew 3:10). This is not meant to scare us. It is meant to wake us up. Now is the time. Today is the day. This moment is the moment to turn around, to change, to become who you were created to be.
The kingdom of heaven has come near. Nearer than you think. As near as your next breath. As near as the person sitting beside you. As near as the beggar you will pass on your way home. As near as the family member you need to forgive. As near as the truth you need to speak. As near as the life you have been afraid to live.
John’s voice still cries out in the wilderness of our modern world: Repent. Change. Transform. Wake up. Be real. Bear fruit. The one who comes after me will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
Are you ready for that fire? Are you ready to burn away everything false and discover what is true? Are you ready to let the desert bloom?
I am. God help me, I am. Let us walk this Advent journey together, preparing the way, making the paths straight, and becoming ready to receive the one who comes to make all things new.
May the heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all. Amen...
