Happy New Liturgical Year…
This first Sunday of Advent is the beginning of a new liturgical year. It is also the year of Matthew’s Gospel, when the worldwide church will hear passages each Sunday from this great Gospel.
Advent is a beautiful season that leads us to the feast of Christmas. A key word for this season might be anticipation. Advent is a time when the church asks us to be mindful of various levels of anticipation. For sure we look forward to Christmas and the celebration of the birth of Jesus (Some of that anticipation is tinged with a bit of anxiety due to the Christmas rush). Belief in the incarnation – the astounding marvel of the Word of God taking flesh and becoming human – is at the very heart of our Christian faith. But as suggested in the Scripture readings for this Sunday, Advent turns our attention to another focus of our anticipation.
Our Christian faith believes that we have a destiny with God. We are not on an endless treadmill, with history turning in an eternal circle without purpose. No, we believe that God is leading us to the complete fulfillment of our human story – a story for us that, both individually and corporately, ends in the loving embrace of God and the unending experience of beauty and love for which we long. Advent prompts us to anticipate that unimaginable yet real endpoint. And today’s Liturgy of the Word uses a variety of images to portray that endpoint of human history.
In the Gospel, we have a metaphor for anticipating that the future may end unexpectedly, “like a thief in the night.” Jesus reminds His disciples that, like their ancestors at the time of Noah, people can live engulfed in everyday concerns but without awareness of what God is asking of them. How many people today live without awareness of God’s love and His presence? How many people live today without even thinking that God is present, and He is in control!?
The disciple of Jesus is to be awake, alert for the moments of grace that can break into our lives unexpectedly. May this Advent be a time of spiritual alertness for us.
Happy Advent to all of you! Fr. Tom