First Sunday of Advent Year C

For two months the shops have proclaimed: ‘Christmas is coming!  40 days to Christmas!’  A feverish spending spree gains momentum! Yet, as today Advent begins our season of preparing for Christmas and we start a new liturgical year, the Church invites us to look beyond Bethlehem.

In the first reading Jeremiah recalls God’s promises, made to King David hundreds of years earlier. Although imprisoned by King Zedekiah the prophet is full of hope and trusts that the Lord will keep his promise and raise up a  ‘just shoot’ from David’s House to ‘do what is right and just in the land’.  Then Judah and Jerusalem will know safety and security.  We believe that Jesus, the glorious Son of Man, fulfils God’s promises. He is our Emmanuel –God with us – in whom we can trust.

Using strong, apocalyptic images, Jesus, in Luke’s Gospel, warns his disciples of cosmic calamities and signs of natural disasters so terrible that ‘people will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world’.  The Synoptic Gospels place this end-times discourse at the end of Jesus’ ministry, before his passion and death.  Neither the disciples, nor we, are to be terrified  or  lose heart, for the events Jesus predicts will usher in the reign of God’s Kingdom. Then Jesus himself, the Son of Man, will return ‘coming in a cloud with power and glory’.  We are to rejoice that our redemption is at hand.

Many would say we are living now in a most chaotic world. Human violence,  corruption and environmental destruction all take their toll.  What are we to do?  Above all we must not give in to despair.  Jesus is very clear. Stay awake.  Be vigilant.  Pray. Lift your head high. Be ready to stand before the Son of Man.

More than ever before our world needs us to be men and women of HOPE and LOVE. We prepare for the future, whatever terrors it holds, by living the present as best we can.

Paul’s reading challenges us to abound in love for one another so we’ll be blameless in holiness ... at the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ,  with all his holy ones.

Can I pray daily today’s Response: To you, O Lord, I lift my soul?

Can I trust that Jesus, Prince of Peace, whose coming I celebrate at Christmas, is the same Son of Man, whose Second Coming in power and glory, will herald in a new heaven and a new earth?

This is the vigilance of a quietly joyful and loving heart that Jesus, and the Advent season, calls us to practise.

Denise Sullivan OP 
29 November 2009