Advent

Some people come to church to get away from the hectic and disturbing aspects of life. They like that. Some people complain that church is unreal since it bears no resemblance to the life they lead. They don;t like that. What is the truth? Is what we do during the celebration of the liturgy an escape from the realities of life? In reflecting on the season of Advent, we have the means for seeing that the liturgy is real, that it reflects life as it is, but the liturgy is also an ideal since it gives a direction and purpose to life.

One of the aspects of life is that we are constantly looking to the future. It begins early when adults insists on asking a child, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”It continues during school years. Most people look forward to marriage, to having children, to advancing at work, to retirement, and then to that which youth seems uncertain and distant, old age and death. Looking to the future is a part of life. It does so in two ways, first by being attentive to an uncertain, and seemingly distant future when Christ will come again to our world to bring His kingdom to perfection. Secondly Advent looks to the future by preparing to celebrate on December 25 the birth of Christ. The two part are not related. About Christ’s second coming we have sure hope because we accept His first coming with firm faith. What God promised was fulfilled in the first coming of Christ and what God still promises will be fulfilled in the second coming of Christ. One promise fulfilled is a pledge of a promise yet to be fulfilled.

God taught His people through the prophets to hope for salvation despite their sinfulness. In fulfillment of God’s will, the Son gave himself up to death, but by rising from the dead He destroyed death and restored life. Hoping for a bright future is a real part of life, and it is of the essence of the season of Advent.

The message of scripture is a message of hope to overcome such negativity. It, too, is a love story of the Lord our God, loves us so much that He wants to live with us, to build a home with us. David wanted to build a temple in which that dependence could be expressed in worship. But God had other ideas. God wanted rather to make the family of David a lasting sign of God’s care and protection. This would be a house build not with cut stones, but with people who would enter a covenant relationship of lasting love and fidelity. The prophets had taught the people to trust that God would be faithful to that promise to David, and today we hear of that trust finding its fulfillment when Mary says: “Let what you have said be done to me.” God believes that men and women are worthy of God’s love, and so establishes God’s dwelling place on earth among the people of Israel, in the house of David.

In our modern world today, many people think of the Christmas story as just another feel-good fairy tale. Such “happy ever after” stories are only for children, to help them to go to sleep. The real world is much more scary, with real-life monsters, committing real-time atrocities. And yet, for those of us who still believe, behind the glitter and the sparkle of Christmas light, there is the truth of God the Father who loves us so much that He sent His only Son, Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary. Jesus is the abiding sign of God’s eternal love; that no matter how much we might experience human failure and disappointment, God’s love never fails; God will never turn back on the promise to come to us and make a home with us.

John the Baptist stood between an old world and a new world. He didn’t belong to the old and he had not yet found the new. His mother called him John, and his father, unable to speak since he had doubted the angel’s announcement of this child’s coming birth, affirmed this in writing: “His name is John.” People were astonished by this, as no one in their family was called by this name. John stood in the desert, and the people came to him at the Jordan. There John found the Messiah he had been waiting for; but Jesus was not, perhaps, the sort of Messiah John had expected.

From the beginning of Advent to the end of the Easter season, we are asked by the Church to make a liturgical journey. It is a journey that follows the path of Christ’s life, because that is the pattern of all Christian life. Advent is the time of expectation and hope. Although we follow the path of those who waited for the Messiah, He has already come. So our hope is different from the hope of Israel. Our hope is not a hope for redemption but a hope for the redemption that began in Christ to come to its completion.

From the very start of St. Mark’s Gospel, we are left in no doubt about the mission of Jesus and His disciples. St. Mark paints a vivid picture of an imperfect world into which a prophet, eating locusts and honey, and dressed in animal skins, suddenly emerges to announce a coming change. The people flock to see John the Baptist because they know that the world needs to change. John clearly understands this struggle, but he acknowledges that it is not a change that he can accomplish himself. John is the messenger who announces the coming of one much greater than himself, one who is strong enough to tackle the world for ever. Jesus will baptize His disciples with the Holy Spirit, so that they will be equipped to bring about the peace and justice for which humanity has waited so long. It is fascinating that none of the traditional elements of the Christmas story have their origins in St. Mark’s Gospel. There are no angels, shepherds or kings. There is no mention of a star in the sky, Mary and Joseph, or even the baby Jesus. For St. Mark, the real issue is the radical breakthrough to the new world of the Good News, which Jesus would later describe as the kingdom of God. St. Mark makes it clear that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. People are drawn to John the Baptist from far and wide to hear this momentous news.

John lived what he preached. Simplicity of life and detachment from unnecessary cares and worries about social life free the heart for a personal relationship with God. In this season of Advent the Church extends to us the call of John the Baptist to repent and confess our sins in preparation for the one who is to come. It is an opportunity to rediscover our hope and trust in God and to let go of false hopes and securities. It is a time for revisiting our life plans, relationships and priorities. Everything that follows from the opening sentence of today’s Gospel – the whole adventure of Jesus among us – marks a new beginning, the beginning of the Good News. Let us reflect upon some new beginnings for ourselves. Consider projects and opportunities that permit us to evaluate our priorities and renew our Christian commitment and what it means for us in the actions of our daily lives. What about projects we can undertake as members of a Christian community? As today’s Gospel shows us, the historical coming of Jesus enjoyed a time of preparation. We too are given this time of preparation in the lead-up to Christmas. Celebrating Advent fully can help us to use this time well for repentance and renewal.

Jesus tells us to stay awake, because the master of the house is coming back; and by this he means that He, Jesus, is coming back. The day will come when we raise our eyes to His face and recognize Him. He loves us too much to stay away forever. When He does come, it will be too late to make preparations and clear up the mess. For better or worse, the king will be home again. It will be a moment of intense happiness for us, but also cause for a certain apprehension, because He is coming as judge. He will judge individually – that will happen when we die – but He will also pronounce judgment on the world and the human race. After the delivery of the last judgment, no one will be able to say, “Oh, but that’s not fair!”, because it will be fair. There will be no place for political argument or shifting of the blame. Isaiah describes it is our first reading today: “We were all like men unclean… We shall all withered like leaves and our sins blew us away like the wind.” Jesus’ words sounds alarming, even threatening, the threat was in the first place to the holy city and the Temple. The early Christians saw this as a sign that the last judgment was imminent.

The moral of the tale is: we are to take responsibility for planetary issues, not just small-scale personal ones. We cannot close our eyes to the state of the earth and what is happening on its surface. We are called to raise our voices and demand decency and justice, and proper stewardship of the world’s resources. St. Luke relays the same teaching of Jesus, about the master returning home from a wedding and finding his servants awake and ready to open up and receive him. The master will be so pleased, says Jesus in this version, that He will sit all His household down at table and wait upon them. That’s the good side of the last judgment; the Lord who is judge is also the Lord who loves us beyond measure. Today we can pray to this Lord of love, asking Him to help us to stay awake, to be sorry for our failing in the past, to care about things that really matters.

The Hebrew sacred scriptures are brimming with the expectation of the justice and peace, the Messiah and the reign of God that will one day come to this world. The Christian sacred scriptures are full of the same expectation and hope. We hear the word “Emmanuel” in our readings twice this Sunday, first in the reading from the prophet Isaiah and then in the Gospel from St. Matthew. It means “God-is-with-us.” St. Matthew not only begins his Gospel with this theme but also ends with it: “And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.” Everything in Jesus’ life – His mission, teaching, miracles and healing, His chasing away of evil, and the events of His last days – are an expression of this “God-is-with-us.”

Advent is a time to prepare not only materially but also spiritually for the coming of the Lord. It is an opportunity to take time out of our busy lives, our tasks and appointments, and simply recognize God’s loving presence in all humanity and in the natural world. Pay special attention to the gift of family and friends, and bless God for all these things. As Christmas draws nearer, we may have a heightened awareness of God’s presence among us and openness to being changed and blessed by it. Become aware of moments, events, encounters, and things you hear, touch, smell. Complaining comes easily to many of us, but as we build up to Christmas Day let us develop a positive approach, appreciating what we have and acknowledging the quiet presence of God in our lives. Recognizing our blessings can change how we look at the day and transmit it. Let us develop a sense of gladness and thankfulness. Let us discover our capacity to praise, making peace with ourselves and with God.

The most famous story of Charles Dickens is A Christmas Carol published in 1843, whose central character bears the name that has come to personify all that is mean and misery – Scrooge. The surviving partner of a London firm of moneylenders and now an old man for whom life means no more than making money, when Christmas comes is is all “humbug” and only begrudingly does he let his clerk, Bob Cratchit, take the time from work to celebrate with his family. But that night Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, then by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet To Come, who take him on journeys into his own past, into the present, where he is shown a world of hardship and poverty which he has ignored, and finally into the future. The night ends in the dawn of a new life for Scrooge: his heart has been truned and he has regained his ability to love and to care for others. All ends on high note of happiness.

Seven year earlier, Dickens’ story “The Goblins who Stole a Sexton” was published as part of The Pickwick Papers. Here we find Gabriel Grubb, sexton and gravedigger, “a morose and lonely man, who consorted with nobody but himself”, and who deicdes one Christmas Eve to raise his spirits by digging a grave. Preferring the gloom of a dark lane to the cheerful sights and sounds of the old street as people prepare for Christmas, he enters the churchyard and sets to work, completing the task with “grim satisfaction”. It is then he is confronted by a goblin and then by a crowd of goblins who transport him to a goblin cavern where he is presented with visions of poor people who, faced with life’s adversities, maintain hope and serenity. He awakes in the morning, convinced that it was not a dream; but cartain that no one will believe his experiences, he resolves to seek his living elswhere. He returns 10 years later to find that indeed very few believe him and many attribute his experiences to drink. But he is changed and better man, and A Christmas Carol is partly modelled on this story.

Truth can be found through experience. Scrooge and Grubb discovered the truth about themselves through their “Other-world” experiences. But in the Gospel, when John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus if He is the “one who is to come,” He tells them that by experiencing His deeds they will discover the truth of His identity. Those who awaited a Messiah of worldly power stumbled and fell against unfulfilled anticipation. That is why Jesus says that anyone who does not lose faith in Him is blessed.

The ghostly visit of Jacob Marley was a warning to Scrooge to find life’s meaning before it was too late. It was too late for Marley. His ghost was fettered with a chain that he had “forged in life” by never letting his spirit venture beyond the narrow limits of his business, instead of making his “business” the needs of others, especially those who were poor. Thomas Merton, in his book No Man is an Island, says that our purpose in life is to discover its meaning and live according to it, and “that each individual has to work out his own personal salvation for himself”. This means the “full discovery” of who I really am. As the days draw nearer to Christmas, may we find ourselves in Christ and not lose faith in Him.

The realities of planting and growth are never very far from biblical texts. The prophetic vision of Isaiah sees the coming Messiah as just that kind of kingdom and is compared to that ruthlessness that all farmers and gardeners know: what is fruitful is nurtured, but what fails to bear fruit is harshly treated. Images of plants and growth are not only beautiful images of God’s mysterious providence; they are also a summons to some hard laboring in the fields. It is in this way that we can hear John the Baptist’s call to prepare the way – and, in particular, his demanding call to repentance and the confession of sin. This turning over of our lives is like the toil of the plough turning over cold, hard ground; it is a necessary work for the blessings of the Holy Spirit, which Jesus brings us, to take root and grow in us. As St. Paul makes clear, it is “when we refuse to give up” that we learn the meaning of hope, and become able to befriend one another properly in Christ. This Advent hope is no passive, weak optimism. Christian hope is what makes sense of the hard labors of our daily life – the digging and the pruning; it is a hope that drives us on to build friendship and unity, to make crooked ways straight, for the coming of Christ into the lives of all people.

The Advent hopefulness that we celebrate today is not only a virtue built on God’s sure promises, but also a hope that calls to action – to the hard work of repentance, of changing the direction of the ways we live. St. Augustine is attributed with saying: “Hope has 2 daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.” Augustine knew that, in the face of our own sins and those of others, we are not, as Christians, lamely to say, “Well, I hope it gets better.” Rather, we are to hope with that passionate action which grows from being rooted in the Father’s will for justice and peace, and conversion towards the kingdom. If we are to really learn hope better, let’s allow ourselves to be properly challenged by John the Baptist’s call to repentance – to know our sins, to repent of them and seek forgiveness from these we have hurt, and from the love of Christ expressed in the sacrament of reconciliation. Let’s actively treat others with the friendship with which God has treated us in Jesus. Perhaps there are 2 or 3 small changes of routine – small “conversions” – which can make this hope a concrete work of preparing the way for Christ to come into the lives of all we meet.

Perhaps on this day we want to pay particular attention to the first reading, because not only is this the first scripture passage to be proclaimed today, it is the first passage for this liturgical year; and, because this is year A, it provides the first words of scripture we read in the entire 3-year cycle. We are told of the “vision” of the prophet Isaiah about Judah and Jerusalem. We are told that something will happen “in the days to come.” Now, for a prophet to be recognized as a genuine spokesperson for the Lord, the prophet’s word had to be fulfilled among the people for whom it had been spoken. Isaiah forsees the day when true peace will come about – a remarkable vision, given that all of Jerusalem is in fear the powerful Assyrians will destroy their city. Peace will be so complete that people will turn their swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks – weapons of war converted into tools for cultivation and growth. St. Paul is even more insistent about something that is coming “soon.” Salvation, he says is nearer at hand than when he and his readers were converted, and “the time” has come; time to “wake up.” Waking up is a metaphor for action, for accepting the Gospel as genuine.

Waking up demands action. The Gospel sounds a note of even more immediacy, when Jesus insists, “stay awake.” Taking the example of the total unawareness about the impending flood in Noah’s time, Jesus urges His disciples to remain awake. His words to them are directed to their preparation for the return of the Son of Man, and let last sentence of today’s Gospel makes it explicit: “you too must stand ready because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

There is, however, something puzzling about the mixture of ideas in today’s Gospel. It is one thing to stand ready for the future return of the Son of Man, but to stay awake is something we can only do for the present. We are people who profess the belief that the Lord is truly present in the Eucharist, in the proclamation of God’s word, where even as few as two or three are gathered in God’s name, and in each of our brothers and sisters who are children of God. To stay awake is to be alert – to be aware of what is going on and to be the lookout for the Lord among us.