First Sunday of Advent Year A

Collect

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Reflection

When you read today’s First Reading and Gospel, the First Sunday of Advent and of the Church’s Liturgical Year, you may wonder whether we are speaking about the same reality. On one hand, in the First Reading Isaiah announces a future full of hope, where swords are turned into ploughshares, almost like the epilogue of the musical Les Misérables, when all the wretched, whatever their misery may be, sing together with one voice: We will walk behind the ploughshare We will put away the sword The chain will be broken And all men will have their reward … almost the idyllic dream that, despite everything, still dares to trust in the goodness of humanity and of creation, because it does not lose its trust in the goodness of the Creator and of his Kingdom.

On the other hand, in the Gospel the tone of Jesus is more serious and grave, because he reminds us that the transition, the passage, from this vale of tears to the garden of the Lord is not something simple or automatic, but requires preparation: not in the sense of signed wills and packed luggage, but in the sense of a struggle that resists letting the flood of the currents of the world we live in sweep us away and drown us. It is a world where the priorities of everyday life displace the priorities of full and eternal life; where we invest in what brings only short-term gain instead of investing in what endures; where our relationships, instead of opening us more genuinely to one another, become merely possessive or manipulative. The passage between these two poles, both real and important, is found in the Second Reading when, in his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul writes: ‘You know the time has come: you must wake up now,’ and later reveals the secret of the Christian life that he himself discovered and that makes all the difference: ‘Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ.’

Perhaps slightly different from the lyrical note that ends Les Misérables, the Kingdom of God, both here on earth and in heaven, has no standards except the cross; there are no flags or uniforms, but there is a garment that we all receive and must put on. We put it on so that our nakedness – our human frailty, limited as it is – may no longer be a source of shame or embarrassment, but may regain the dignity it possessed at the beginning of creation, because it is freed from the harmful ways in which we view and use our own bodies and those of others; freed from whatever chains of enslavement bind us; freed from the spirit of dominance and control, whether of others over us or of us over others, even if expressed only in subtle but all the more insidious ways.

Above all, it is the armout that makes each of us resemble Christ in our own unique way, and the ongoing challenge of Christian life is this: in circumstances that are constantly changing, with my own person and personality that also change with time and with the experiences, good and bad, that life leads me through, how am I to grow into a greater likeness to Jesus, and help those around me become more like Jesus? How am I to work so that the Church and society may more closely resemble the ideal of the Gospel, which is not a political manifesto but a different vision of how we look at and guide the very realities that lie before us?

Prayer

Lord Jesus, as we begin another liturgical year which, just as the year measures the time our planet takes to orbit the sun, so also measures our turning as a Church, as a people, around you, the Sun of Justice, open our hearts to welcome the invitation and to rise from slumber, from the indifference that sometimes overtakes us, so that we may renew within us the commitment of baptism: to put on you in the many faces of yours whom we shall meet Sunday after Sunday in the Liturgy.

Amen.