Advent

We talk about faith in different ways. Some of us with less, some with greater ease. The problem is that it is much more difficult to say “I believe” than to talk about faith.
As long as we stay on the surface of more or less theoretical considerations about matters of faith or ask about the lives of others and about things that do not directly affect our personal lives, talking about faith comes relatively easily to us; anyway – who knows – maybe it’s just a conversation about religion… A real conversation about faith is a decision to – like Mary – let God enter our lives and change literally everything in it. Cross the border of the impossible.

When we read in today’s Gospel that “nothing is impossible for God”, perhaps it is worth realizing that exceeding the impossible is often achieved in completely different ways than those we imagine. The impossibility associated with the lack of a husband is only a shadow that impossibility that was transcended when God decided that “a virgin would conceive and bear a Son” and that He, born of a woman, would be “great and called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God would give Him the throne of His father David, and His dominion there will be no end.”

Christ the Lord entered our human world completely unexpectedly and not in the way a person could imagine. Although, He was expected, He showed up unexpectedly. While the world expected the triumphant appearance of the Messiah, He came in the mystery of our humanity and in all the simplicity of human birth. Although one could have expected an enthusiastic welcome, it turned out that the door was closed to Him.
The greatest impossibility that God exceeds and that He forces us all to overcome is the unimaginable, incomprehensible and exceeding all human expectations truth that God took on a human body from Mary and became a man.

The very titles of the TV programs with the word “show” in the foreground – or at least in the subtext – reveal the dominant method. Namely, it is about creating idols, winners, successful people who, thanks to television, have made a career and become the audience’s favorites. All this, of course, is an excellent sell, but unfortunately few people realize that these “favorites” lead their admirers nowhere…

Whenever I return to the figure of St. John the Baptist, I am moved by his ability to remain in the background. In everything he does, one thought always stands out: He must increase and I must decrease. St. John doesn’t want to keep anything to himself. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s favorite. His only desire is to prepare the way of the Lord. So that Jesus could come and find everything ready to receive the Good News.

This must be treated as a challenge for our times. In a world that creates idols in order to use their faces, behaviors and ways of dressing to arouse new needs and create fashions that will bring huge profits, it is necessary to be able to distance oneself from this extremely strong pressure – first from the media and, consequently, also from society.

There are many important issues that we can care about and strive for. Having the right talents and recognizing the tasks to which God calls us, we must undertake them with full responsibility. However, we cannot forget that we are not supposed to lead people to ourselves and not our own way. Like St. John the Baptist and many other people of God, we must take responsibility for others, i.e. lead them.

“Comfort, comfort my people!” – with these words God calls us to comfort His nation in Babylonian captivity. What is a consolation? In the Holy Scripture it is never a downplaying of a difficult situation, an empty statement like: “Cheer up, it’s not that bad.” God, comforting a man, takes him in His arms, offers him closeness, binds his wounds, heals him, and stays with him in pain. God’s consolation is reconstruction, creation anew. The German theologian, Karl Rahner expressed it this way: “Consolation is for the believer the gift of experiencing that the love of God in Christ sustains every life, even those that seem to be astray or falling into ruin.” God, bringing comfort, enters the very center of human sadness and desperation, descends to the very bottom of our “pits” and awakens hope in us. He who is Emmanuel, God-with-us, strengthens us “when the nights are sleepless, when the days are powerless”, when “we scream, we are silent, we chase the dawn” (Peter du Chateau).

Every person needs consolation to gain new strength and not to escape from the helplessness of others. However, when comforting others, we experience all our helplessness and powerlessness. We are entering situations where not words, but silently staying with someone is the only and true consolation. We learn that there is no comfort in those who are prone to uttering platitudes that do not heal but hurt even more. The one who can truly console us is the one who, in the darkness, in the middle of “too night” (Peter du Chateau), saw the light of hope lit by God.

The prophet from today’s first reading found himself in a similar situation. God ordered him to preach words of comfort. We know that he followed this call, but he certainly had to carry with him the burden of the fragility of his own faith and the narrowness of his heart. What to do when, in the face of suffering, depression and doubt, words do not come out of our mouths? We must believe deeply that God also works through the imperfections of human words and gestures. This is rarely done in a spectacular way. God works most often in secret: in the privacy of our sensitive hearts.  Advent announces that God who comforts comes to people in the person of Jesus Christ.  He is all our comfort.

Every year, Advent makes us realize that once again we have become too attached to this world and have become too embedded in the present. We have forgotten that this world will come to an end and that nothing will remain as it is. Advent makes us look and look into the future. It is, like the present, full of both light and darkness.

But our future is Jesus Christ! He is the One who came and who will come again; He is the One who continually comes. And Christians are waiting for His day, His Advent. Advent means: coming, coming of God to man. God meets us: He gives us the present, the present time as a time of grace, as a path to the future. “I am the way,” says Jesus, the Incarnate God who entered our reality. Advent reminds us that Christians are people full of gratitude and blessed impatience. As Saint Paul says, we are to be grateful for the gifts of the Spirit: for faith and hope in the “revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” We should wait impatiently for His coming, we should go out to meet Him and pursue Him persistently. And the degree of our holy impatience depends on the greatness of our faith and love. Their everyday testimony is faithfulness. Can someone be faithful who almost never puts off meeting the Lord until after a saint “NEVER”?

Advent calls us to vigilance: “Be careful and watch, for you do not know when this time will come,” says today’s Gospel. To be vigilant means to see clearly the reality in which we live and the reality towards which we are heading. It is Christ who is already among us in His word, sacrament and brother.

Advent announces that God is close, very close. You can meet Him. We, humans have no yardstick with which to measure His immeasurability; we have no hands to grasp Him; we do not have concepts that could capture His essence and help us understand Him. But He gave us a heart capable of seeking and finding Him. God is close, although hidden.

The time of Advent, which begins today, calls us to return to God’s ways, so that the coming Lord will not find us lost in the wilderness, in dark alleys and blind paths.

St. John the Baptist doesn’t care about words! And yet he was listened and had great authority, because he confirmed his words with the testimony of his own life.

Undoubtedly, the Holy Spirit also confirms his words, by giving them a power of conviction that no human words had a power by itself. People were aware that they were standing before the prophet, that John was fulfilling a mission commissioned by God Himself. Very important was what he preached and the power with which he did it. Therefore, crowds flocked to him from afar, even though his words were certainly not flattery. But the truth, even when it is hard, is more attractive than empty flattery.

The Jews did not understand the essence of their faith or the heritage of Abraham. They considered the mere fact of belonging to the Jewish nation, and thus to the descendants of Abraham, to be a sufficient guarantee of salvation, and even a reason to be proud and a title to various privileges.

Meanwhile, the descent from Abraham not only does not determine anything, but also obliges. Abraham was justified on the basis of his radical and unconditional faith. Abraham’s inheritance is above all a commitment to faith, to total trust and obedience to God. Many understood and fulfilled this, but there were also those who considered this noble vocation and the dignity of the child of Abraham as circumstances exempting them from personal efforts of faith for the sake of external appearances of religious life.

This is why John the Baptist placed so much emphasis on the authenticity of conversion. It was the only chance to return to God. If even this act were to be reduced to formalities and appearances, then there would be no salvation left for a man. And the conversion will be authentic if it bears fruit in the form of a change of life attitude. Baptism with water was only a sign of repentance: it expressed the desire of man to lead his life differently. The baptism of Christ announced by John was supposed to have and has a real power of purification: if a man with humility and faith humbles himself before Jesus, then the action of the Holy Spirit, like fire, will cleanse us of human weaknesses and faults, and make us perfect before God.

The last Sunday of this year’s Advent is the first day of celebration. Advent ends. Christmas begins. Four candles are lighted on an Advent wreath. It’s not a decoration, it’s a clock reminding us of how great gift the time is. We live in time. No moment comes back. Every hour is a gift and a task. Each day brings new challenges and new grace. New hardships and new joys. How much do we respect our effort? No doubt a lot. But if the time would not be given to us, it would not be anything. Together with time and its passing, everything is a gift. We can multiply and improve this gift. 

Therefore, when something ends, something also is a beginning. That is why Christians should be happy. What is the biggest gift? The time? No. The biggest gift is the coming of God’s Son in the time and the space of our earthly history. It was announced by the prophets. The biggest gift is that God the Father gave us His only Son, and the Son gave himself. Since that time we start to count passing of years. It is not an important mistake of time – the reference point itself is important: the day on which God said His “yes” and Mary replied “yes”. Soon she went on the road and went with a hurry to Elizabeth, carrying th Mystery yet invisible to eyes. Many people passed the young Miriam carrying Jesus’ already conceived. How many of them felt that this beautiful and smiling girl is not someone ordinary? How many felt the presence of God? 

For sure Elizabeth: Blessed you are among women! – she cried – Blessed fruit of your womb! She guessed by herself? No. This is the third gift of God: the evangelist says that the Holy Spirit filled Elizabeth. I would like to have a heart as sensitive as she, so I wont miss the biggest gift. To not miss the moment when Jesus will stand at my door. I need the gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith is not naivety. On the contrary – the naive is that it seems that everything can be explained and prove. We know that the faith is God’s gift. So you can always multiply it. You can also, unfortunately, turn off this spark of faith, and to lose the gift. While a man lives, while the time of earthly life flows, while we light up further candles on an Advent wreath, while you can free yourself from naivety and self-confidence – there is a hope to ignite the spark of faith. 

The last days of Advent, are for Christians, for me and for you, days of gratitude: to God of Father – for giving us His Son. To God the Son – for the fact that He wanted to be one of us… that He had a mother, a donkey, Bethlehem … and after years – the cross, to actually be one of us to the very end. To God the Holy Spirit – for the fact that with a gift of faith, He allows us to see further than the most courageous human expectations. The days of great gratitude are about to begin …

People gathered at the Jordan River were shaken by the words of St. John the Baptist, they also felt the near presence of Jesus. They stood and cried: “What should we do?” St. John said: Love your neighbors with your attitude and word; a man is the greatest value of the world. The world without humans would be nonsense and nothing.

Advent is a time, where we especially have to sensitize our hearts for the needs of a second person. Living in the Church community, we have to think about how we will experience our Christmas time. Are we going to have sad, crying, unhappy and broken faithful? Such sense have words: “If anyone has two dresses … and who has food, let them do so.” Because we are children of one God.

But St. John the Baptist goes deeper. He reminds about the greatness and dignity of man. “Do not bully no one … do not oppress anyone”, that is love your neighbors. In the community, such as the Church, there is a place for all people: and this newborn who will be baptize soon, and the elderly who cannot do anything on his own. For healthy and sick, strong and weak, for everyone! Today in the world, and also in our country, what is weak, fragile, which seemingly does not bring profit is reject, and a faithful person, living in a godly manner and life according to the Jesus’ Gospel feels anxiety, breaking and humiliation.

St. John the Baptist does not demand that people – like him – will go to the desert to live an ascetic life, but calls and encourages us to see another person, and to understand that Christ also comes to the earth for other people.

Today’s Gospel evokes the words of the Prophet Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten the paths for Him, every valley should be filled, each mountain and hunts, the winding roads let them become simple and bumpy with smooth roads. And all people will see God’s salvation.” This meaningful picture of work related to the equalization and preparation of roads shows an extremely artistic way what to do in human life: a complete internal change. Our daily experience tells us that the tasks which we have to do or the effects of professional work every day, you can easily verify, evaluate and reward. However, when we penetrate into the heart of man, we are thinking about this work, which is called “work on yourself“, it turns out that achieving specific effects and their evaluation is not so simple and obvious.

I encourage that the Advent time, especially the confession preparing us for Christmas celebration, did not leave anyone indifferent on calls to prepare the Lord’s ways in our lives. Just as the setting of a new road demands a specific, planned work of many people, so our way to God needs an internal commitment that will not stop on saying of several learned sentences, but through specific resolutions and actions will lead us to authentic improvement.

Who prays better – thick or skinny? Absurd question? I think not exactly. Although it cannot be answered, checking the importance of a man, but you can say that overweight and underweight can also be an obstacle on the way to God. You can consider whether spiritual exercises do not like these exercises that affect the body. 

“Watch out for yourself that your hearts are not heavy due to gluttony, drunkenness and temporal worries.” In one sentence, the Gospel gives us a simple, but also very universal: remember that the body and spirit combine with each other. Heart rate, i.e. the lack of a spirit, commitment, reluctance to take anything or simply gradual falling into a laziness very often combine with a lifestyle of human life.

If we wanted to translate this one sentence about the gluttony, drunkenness and worldly concerns to the contemporary language, you would have to realize that the problem becomes extreme. In the US are fast foods, in which for a few dollars you can eat to fall, without any restrictions. On the other hand, the figures of models that do not know what normal nutrition means. In one and the second case, we are losing a man – a spirit who is to revive him.

So – that the human heart would not be heavily “due to temporal worries”, and attention to the external appearance would not sleep the spirit, which turns towards God, you need – simply – keep the moderation: in drinking, eating, watching TV, sitting on a computer and navigating on the internet, reading books…

On the 3rd Sunday of Advent each year, St. John the Baptist features in the Gospel; only in Year A do we encounter John in prison, near the end of his life. John knows his life is likely to end very soon on the command of Herod, so he wants to make sure he has not been mistaken in identifying Jesus as the awaited Messiah. He sends a disciple to find out.

Those who go back to John will need to do more than tell what they have seen and heard.

The question arises, how well do we recognize the signs that the kingdom of God is among us today? Few of us have the power to do many things literally, but we do have power to do so in a spiritual sense. We must recognize Jesus in His coming and in each person we encounter. So many people are voiceless in today’s world, but we can help their voices be heard; our own lives proclaim the Good News of Jesus when we are concerned for others’ well being.