Advent Sunday I

Advent Sunday I – Year A

Isaiah 2:1-5 Romans 13:11-14 Matthew 24:37-44

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Divine Revelation has come recently to be as much about intelligent, human discovery, appreciation and insight as it has been for millenia about communication from God to humanity. With the ever-increasing sophistication and complication of life in all modern cultures – in all cultures which meet and engage reality – so, too, must our theological reflections sophisticate and become more complex and nuanced. To behave as if we lived in an oversimplified (and poorly-imagined) past era or in a culture foreign to where we really find ourselves is a sad pretense at best. It might even be an unhealthy denial of reality. We believers today, rather, embrace God’s Word which is “alive and active; sharper than a two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12) and so reject any such attitudes and behaviors. We try our best to engage the Gospel message fully through healthy Church practice, and to listen to and reflect upon God’s Word from our modern and active frames of reference even as we work to understand the original settings and contexts which produced these ancient perceptions of God’s gracious and important self-disclosure. The fundamental reason to attend to these ancient texts is so that we believers can grow and evolve in our own lives parallel to how the ancient believers grew and evolved in their eras. To cite a proposal from Megan McKenna’s book Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible, “... the text of the scriptures is inspired ... written for our conversion ... [and] ... should never be used to prove anything ...” (See pp. 215-217). In our liturgies the sacred texts are proclaimed to us, for us, and with the deliberate intention of changing us in ways healthy, constructive and holy. The reflections proposed on this website for the past year and for the next on the sacred texts for Sundays and some principal feasts are composed from this perspective. Indeed, the Sacred Word (i.e., God’s message) is for encouragement, consolation, edification and enlightenment. It is sometimes instructive, informative and can increase our insight. But, it is also frequently provocative, challenging and prophetic. It might well rebuke and chastise the hearers (us!) and the current popular culture and accepted practices and values, even the values and practices of the Church. It does all these things and it does them most effectively when we, the hearers of the Word, are most intelligent, thoughtful, considerate and critically open to the whole message. One important principle for any healthy and sound scripture study is “Culture incarnates the Gospel and the Gospel critiques the Culture.” In other words, it falls to us believers to live and apply the whole Gospel message concretely, and it falls to the whole Gospel message to critique (evaluate, challenge, correct and encourage) precisely how we live.

With the First Sunday of Advent we begin the Year A Liturgical Cycle with the seasonal exhortation to engage life fully, consciously and actively. Matthew’s Gospel text uses apocalyptic language to exhort the hearers to be alert and active as an ordinary way of life. In some aspects of Catholic (and other Christian) Tradition, we have become accustomed to a passive acceptance of Divine Will as the preached norm. However, this sort of low-energy approach insinuates two things which the modern Church has de-emphasized for positive reasons. First of all, our communal image of God is becoming less and less that of an arbitrary, capricious potentate and increasingly that of a loving, affectionate, wise parent, as Jesus called God, “Father” (Abba in Aramaic). Such a wise parent does not function merely by decree, but by loving persuasion, wise formation and constructive engagement. Secondly, a medieval idea of the Divine Will was that of a hidden plan laid out in detail from which we deviated at our eternal peril. Such a simplistic description is increasingly off-putting to modern, intelligent believers, because it subverts and minimizes the facts that a) we are created in God’s image and likeness, b) to be free and responsible, and c) that God is intelligent and engaging with us who are God’s adult (!) children. Thus, an apocalyptic fear of sudden ambush by the Last Judgment is not a message our ears expect from a loving and wise God. Rather, the healthy, modern appreciation of the message is to engage in life fully, consciously and actively, now and always. Staying alert means to stay alive in all the gifts of God’s Holy Spirit. In a similar way we ought to read and hear the passage from Romans. Paul lived and ministered in the earliest Christian era when the common expectation was still that the Risen Jesus would return soon to both end the world and escort the saved into Heaven. Indeed, this turned out to be greatly over simplified expectation, and, indeed, it’s error is much to our benefit today! Had the Risen Christ returned as expected and actually ended the world, none of us would be here today! Perhaps, the expectation of an urgent and sudden 2^nd Advent was more the early Christian hope for salvation from the harshness of their day, couched in apocalyptic imagery, rather than a well-considered, theological insight into God’s hopes for believers. In any event, perhaps we ought not expect a 2^nd Coming of the Christ in quite the same ancient terms. For us, the true 2^nd Coming is more likely to occur at the time of each individual personal death in this world. To be true to the Gospel message, however, it must be seen as a joyful and hopeful moment, not one of fear and terror. Indeed, the separation caused by death is humanly painful and sometimes tragic, but it is part of healthy reality. Our Paschal faith gives us hope in the temporary nature of such an expected separation. But, we are embarking in Advent on a renewed appreciation of the Mystery of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh to dwell among us. Our Advent reflections encourage us to appreciate and engage life in the wonder of God’s Holy Spirit and ever-present Grace.

Isaiah’s text for today is an idealization of what the kingdom of God would be like in ancient Jewish terms. Composed in the final third of the 8^th Century BC, Isaiah was reflecting on the fall and destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel from the vantage point of Jerusalem in the southern Kingdom of Judah. He was exhorting the king and the people of Judah to shore up their hope in the God who had saved their ancestors so regularly. For him, Jerusalem was the metaphor for God’s ultimate act of salvation which would not be restricted to Jews alone, but would also include all God’s creatures! Such a description – no more war, no more ignorance, no more want – was and still remains an appeal to all to hear the promise of salvation from this Saving God of Judah. This particular scripture passage sets the tone for our liturgical Advent Season. It invites us to reflect upon and celebrate the coming Mystery of the Incarnation. Popular imagination has come to equate Christmas with the mere birthday of Jesus. But, Christmas is the festival of the savior’s birth, not his birth date or day. And the Nativity of the Savior is a focus of the Mystery of the Incarnation, God truly among us as one of us.

Thus, we hear and reflect upon the sacred texts for the purpose of our own on-going conversions. Let us renew our commitment to engage life fully and thoughtfully in Gospel terms, being awake and alert for whatever life brings our way. We stand firm in hope in God’s salvation in this life and in the next. Blessed Advent!