First Sunday of Advent – Sunday, 29th November 2015

First Sunday of Advent (Year C)

(Sunday 29th November 2015)

We are beginning a new Liturgical Year and, therefore, we celebrate the season of Advent – a season much loved by devout Christians partly because it is one of the few Church seasons that has not been hijacked by the commercial world. The Gospel text that we have just heard announces this new season, a season of watching, waiting and preparing for the coming of Our Lord. It is important to be aware that the coming of the Lord, which is anticipated in Advent, is twofold. There is the first coming of our Lord: the birth of the Christ-child in a stable in Bethlehem; God coming to dwell among us. Advent anticipates this event, the birth of Our Lord, and so is a season in which we wait expectantly for the holy night of Christmas. Advent is also, however, a season of looking ahead and preparing for the Lord’s Second Coming when the Holy Spirit’s missionary activity will come to an end and Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, the glorious moment which we call the Last Judgment. The Gospel we have just heard focuses more on this second coming than on the first. It speaks in the future tense saying: “then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory”. When the Lord comes again a second time he will grant justice to each person and will honour each person’s definitive choice: those who are just he will liberate to experience happiness for all eternity and those who are wicked he will leave in the misery of their wickedness. Let us be ready for the day of judgment.

In recent years in Ireland (and other places) there has been an increase in a quasi-religious practice called “mindfulness”.  Some religious groups run courses on “mindfulness” while many corporate businesses allocate resources to “mindfulness programs” in an effort to bring calmness to the lives of their employees. This phenomenon seems to be reaching out to a great hunger in people for silence, stillness and attentiveness. Now, while many of the mindfulness courses are sadly lacking in Christian content, the Gospel that we have just heard gives us instruction in how to be truly mindful in an authentically Christian way.  Jesus instructs us to be watchful of ourselves; to be alert to how the allurements of the world can trap us and keep us in bondage.  Jesus warns us that even the ordinary “cares of life” can coarsen our hearts if we are not careful.

Jesus asks us to pray at all times but not in an aimless way. Our prayer, to be powerful, should be oriented to an encounter with Christ who is near at hand. Being oriented to Christ, to long for his coming, means that we are liberated from being engrossed in our own small world. Our prayer become “ecstatic”, the original and proper meaning of which (for genuine Christian mystics) is that one “goes out of oneself” away from the smallness of ourselves and swept up into the light of Christ. We fill our minds with Christ. Prayer, then, is a real encounter with a real person, Christ, the One through whom all things are made.

What better way is there to pray than to sit in silent prayer, for a full hour – perhaps in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament – in expectation of the return of Jesus?  His return is already contained as a mystery in the Blessed Sacrament and will one day soon be manifest in full when he will come in power and glory.  Advent is truly a season of authentic Christian prayer.  It is a season in which we should commit ourselves to deepening our prayer lives and making prayer the pattern of our life, the hinge on which our entire day turns.  Let us watch and pray so that we will be able to stand in confidence before Jesus when he comes again.  Let us be ready so that we will be pure enough and strong enough to cope with the ferocity of his loving gaze.  His love is a burning fire that even shakes the sun and the moon and the stars.

Fr. Eamon Roche