Advance Team

There’s a lot happening this week.

We’ve already begun the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Monday is Martin Luther King’s birthday.

Wednesday we have the March for Life.

We’re in the middle of Poverty Awareness Month.

Busy times.

And every few years we squeeze an added presidential inauguration into this week.

These programs and events take a lot of preparation.

Ecumenical teams at the World Council of Churches prepare their programs.

Prayers, liturgies, readings, and other events for Christian Unity.

Thousands of organizers tackle the massive preparation effort for the March for Life.

Preparing Masses, rallies, and other events.

Preparing plans to handle all the challenging logistics.

All the work of accommodating hundreds of thousands of marchers.

A lot of effort goes into the preparation for any important event.

In modern political campaigns, that’s the job of the advance man, or woman or team.

Getting everything prepared for the candidate who will come after them.

Someone has to make sure everything’s ready.

The reservations, transportation, media, security, venues—even the crowds.

This advance work to prepare for someone’s coming isn’t really a new idea.

And it’s not limited to politics.

It’s for generals, CEO’s, celebrities, popes and all sorts of important people.

They all have someone to lead the preparation for their coming.

Even to serve as the warm-up act to get the crowd ready for the headliner to take the stage.

Advance teams work to prepare for even more mundane events.

Before an organization installs a new computer system they send someone out to the offices.

To make sure the physical site is ready for the new equipment.

And to make sure the users are trained and prepared for the new system.

Before a builder begins construction, others go out to survey and evaluate and prepare the site.

Advance men have played an important role since the time leaders first began making appearances.

It’s an ancient practice.

As it turned out, all the prophets were advance men—preparing the way for Jesus’ coming.

But John the Baptist was the prophet closest to Jesus.

Closest in time and space—they were contemporaries, they actually met.

Closest in kinship—the Gospels tell us their mothers were cousins.

Closest in spirit—John sensed Jesus’ presence when both were still in the womb.

When they met 30 years later, John knew at a glance that Jesus was the Lamb of God.

John the Baptist is the perfect model of the advance man.

Jesus himself said that there was no man born of woman who was greater than John.

John started with a single-minded dedication to his mission.

Preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah.

When people thought he himself might be the Messiah,

He was quick to correct them and stress his humbler role as merely the one helping to prepare.

And, when the time came, he was quick to point people toward the true Messiah.

He didn’t seek fame and glory for himself.

His greatest satisfaction was serving God and serving well.

Preparing the people, so that they might better recognize and accept Jesus.

John was fully committed to serving the Messiah before he even knew who the Messiah was.

And when the Messiah’s identity was revealed to him, he dedicated himself to Jesus.

It was his great joy to be surpassed by the one he had worked so hard to promote.

We can strive to follow the example given by John.

We already have a lot in common with him.

Our primary mission is the same as his.

To know, love and serve God in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.

His more specific mission was to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus.

And we share that more specific mission too.

Jesus is coming again.

We need to prepare ourselves and others for that coming.

He won’t come unrecognized, as he came to Israel.

We’ll next see him when he comes in glory at the end of time.

Or, more likely, when we face him for judgment at our own death.

But either way, the next time we see him there will be no doubt that he is God.

We need to be always prepared for his coming.

We need to prepare ourselves.

And we need to be God’s advance men, helping prepare others.

The preparations John made benefited the people of his day.

But also everyone who came after them—including us.

His words and actions continue to strengthen and guide us today.

We benefit directly from the impact of his words and acts as they’re proclaimed in the Gospels.

We also benefit from the goodness that those acts and words have brought into the world.

Through the impact they had on those who were present there with John.

Witnessing those actions and hearing those words.

And by the response of those new disciples; the goodness their actions and words have brought.

And all that resulting accumulated goodness, growing and flowing down through generations.

Today, we’re the ones God is counting on to continue and increase that flow of goodness.

To spend our efforts preparing for something far greater than an election or a new building.

It’s up to us to make the Gospel known.

To testify, as John testified, through our words and acts and example.

God’s now counting on us to prepare the way for his coming.

Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jn 1:29-34           Read this Scripture @usccb.org