1st Sunday of Advent 2021
Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thess 3:12-4:2; Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36
If I were to ask you “What is Advent about?” I suspect that most of you would reply “Preparing for Christmas” and you would be right—up to a point. Advent IS a preparation for Christmas, just as Lent is a preparation for Easter, and to the same extent.
Lent is a preparation for Easter, but I am sure that you would agree that it is far more than that. It is also a matter of following Jesus into the wilderness and, in the events of Holy Week, to the Cross. Advent too is far wider than we might imagine.
In Advent, we look in three directions. We look backwards, to the First Coming of the Son of God in our human flesh, but we also look forward to His Second Coming in glory as Judge at the end of time, and we look to the present, to recognise His coming at every moment of our lives.
The looking back is present today in our First Reading which, in the time of its writing, was a looking forward. Jeremiah prepares the people for the coming of a “virtuous branch”, a descendant of the House of David “who shall practise honesty and integrity in the land”. We identify that “virtuous branch” as Jesus, Messiah and Saviour, whose birth we recall in our Christ Mass, our Christmas celebration.
Yet we must be careful not to rush to Christmas too soon. The promise of the Messiah and, more particularly, of His Kingdom, will be kept before our eyes throughout Advent by our reading of the prophet Isaiah, but it is important to remember that the Church does not begin to focus on the Christmas event until 17th December, devoting the last week of Advent to proximate preparation for the feast, as the last week of Lent is a proximate preparation for Easter.
Until then, our focus is directed to the Second Coming of Our Lord, and, perhaps most importantly of all, to His present coming every day in our lives. Consequently today’s Gospel prepares us, not for the First Coming of Jesus, which has already happened, but for His return in glory.
The warnings contained in Jesus’ prophecy seem to take on a particular urgency in our own time. We are literally “bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves” as rising sea levels threaten the very existence of island nations such as the Maldives, the Bahamas, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, while dire predictions tell us that the melting of the polar ice will bring increasingly destructive flooding to our own coastal areas. Nations are in agony throughout the earth, and there are many signs of impending disaster.
Whether all of this presages the imminent return of the Son of Man I do not know, but there is certainly enough evidence of our own mortality to shake us out of complacency. While we make our own small efforts to protect the world, uniting them with, we hope, the larger scale efforts of governments, we remain conscious that we live each day in the light of eternity, and that an end, and a final encounter with the Judge, will come for us, if not yet for the earth.
So, as both the Gospel and the reading from the First Letter to the Thessalonians remind us, we must remain alert, conscious that each day may be our last, and using that awareness not to fill us with despair, or to lead us to seek refuge in Christmas lights, alcoholic oblivion, or even sentimental devotion, but to lead us to deeper prayer, and a stronger love for our neighbour both near and far.
We look, then, in Advent, both back and forward, but, perhaps most importantly, we look around, to recognise the coming of Christ and His presence here and now, today. We deepen our awareness of the Christ who comes today, in the people who cross our path, whether closely or remotely, of whom Our Lord said “whatever you did to the least of mine you did to me”; in the events of daily life, which bring us a share in the anguish of Gethsemane and Calvary and in the joy of the Resurrection, in the silence of our private prayer, and in the Mass where He comes in the gathering of His people, in His word, and in the Body broken and the Blood poured out, offered to the Father and shared with us.
Jesus came in the past; He will come in the future; but especially, He does come in the present, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. As Karl Rahner, the great twentieth century German Jesuit theologian and spiritual writer, expressed in a prayer to Jesus: “Now is the one single hour of your Advent.”
