Matthew 3:1-6. Matthew introduces us to John the Baptist who came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." This is who Isaiah was speaking of when he said "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord." John wore a camel hair tunic with a leather girdle and ate locusts and honey. All of Jerusalem and Judea and the surrounding areas went out to him and were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins.

Yesterday was the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus and one of the first readings for Mass was the quoted reading from Isaiah. It has struck me before, and even more so yesterday, that Isaiah's punctuation is different from Matthew's quote. Isaiah wrote "A voice cries out: in the desert prepare the way of the Lord." (Isaiah 40:3). so Isaiah's colon is before in the wilderness (or desert), so the voice is telling us to prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness. Matthew's quote has the colon after in the wilderness, so that is where the voice is. Does this make any real difference? I don't think so, but it does make me think.

We are all in the wilderness, we are all separated from our eternal home while here on earth, so we are in the dry desert. We might look around and see all the good things that God has given us and rely on them for comfort, which is good, but if we don't always realize that we are in the desert then that can be even worse - we can start to use those things as a substitute for God and become too attached to them.

Jesus cannot come into our lives the way he wants to and needs to when our lives are cluttered with stuff that we are clinging to, so he asks us to leave that stuff behind and come into the wilderness to meet him. There we can follow a straight path to him with none of our earthly distractions. Thus, the people were flowing out of Jerusalem and Judea, leaving everything behind, to go have an encounter with this strange man in the desert. Once there they were able to see their sins more clearly, confess them, repent, and be baptized. They still got to go home, but then everything looked different - they could now see their stuff for what it really is, gifts of comfort in the desert while we find our way to our true home. They received the best gift they could get, but they had to go into the desert to receive it.

So John is in the desert crying out because he has given up all attachments and sees his path clearly; but the path is also in the wilderness because that is where we all have to go to see it clearly for ourselves.