Advent Sunday I – Year B
With a change of liturgical seasons, we begin again the annual cycle of remembrance and reflection on the Gospel mysteries which describe the person and mission of Jesus Christ, i.e., his Gospel message. Advent presents a retrospective selection of scripture reflections on how the ancient Jewish faith focused upon remembering God’s saving deeds. Indeed, the God of Israel was the God of Salvation. So it seemed to the early Christian disciples of the Risen Jesus that he was the herald of God’s Salvation in the most complete and perfect manner. His Advent (i.e., his “coming” to the world) was effectively summed up in the theological phrase, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” i.e., the Mystery of the Incarnation (John 1:14). His public ministry, including his teaching and consistent example of completely truthful love, put the Good News of God’s Salvation into rather new and somewhat sophisticated philosophical and theological terms. The loving and gratitude-centered self-sacrifice of his own life – the events from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his Last Supper, his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, his Ascension and Pentecost – comprise his Paschal Mystery. His professed intimacy and unity with God and his total love of neighbor became examples by which all his disciples strive to embrace his Gospel and enter into a fellowship of love and wisdom. Thus, do we find ourselves at the beginning of the liturgical season of Advent with the task of remembering and giving thanks for God’s Salvation through both the Jewish people’s ancient faith-filled history, and through the faith, example, and Tradition of our Christian ancestors.
Once the Advent, Christmas and Epiphany Seasons have concluded, the lectionary will chiefly use Mark’s Gospel’s account of Jesus’ life and ministry in the Sunday Liturgies of the Word. Lectionary Year B is the cycle called The Year of Mark.
An ever-present task for Catholics who thoughtfully hear, proclaim, and preach the lectionary is to maintain the healthy liturgical hierarchy of seasons and feasts, and to avoid anticipating liturgical seasons and feasts ahead of their calendar times. In other words, Advent is before Christmas, but Christmas ought to be kept separate from and subsequent to Advent. We must also remember that liturgical seasons set the liturgical tone over and above any less significant feast day, even the culturally popular ones. This is a great challenge in practical terms for us who live in modern cultures like ours which has appropriated Christmas for their own, un-theological purposes: holidays and parties, gift-giving and children’s activities, cultural-secular decorations and commercialism, even religious superstition. We really cannot do much about such cultural realities, but at Sunday (and weekday) liturgies, we can work hard to appreciate and celebrate Advent without detractions ... at least until Christmas Eve. It is also important to make the seasons and feasts adult and mature events. To reduce the sacred mysteries to childish levels renders them silly, shallow and superficial. Our Gospel and liturgical faith is strong, loving, and wise ... and for grownups. So, be polite, sensitive, and mature. For thoughtful Christians who seek the challenge of self-discipline, try to avoid wishing anyone else “Merry Christmas!” until Christmas Eve, and then, persist in using that greeting daily through Epiphany. Success could invite questions from many, and thus, provide you a Gospel opportunity to catechize on the Mystery of the Incarnation. And, so, to our Advent Sunday lessons.
The second reading today points out that you and I, i.e., all the baptized, have been “called to fellowship.” In other words, we are not in the Church by accident or by mere coincidence. Being baptized bestows not merely the status of “Christian.” Somehow and for some reason, God’s loving Will has moved us to associate within the Gospel community in some active and dynamic manner. The church community is often called “fellowship” in the New Testament writings. It is a word used not frequently enough among Catholics and other mainline Christians. To some it has a decidedly non-Catholic and non-institutional ring to it. And, yet, it is very descriptive of the most practical effects the Gospel ought to have on the lives of each and every believing Christian: fraternal love and compassion. We ought to live with and among other believing Christians in a sort of loving, engaging, challenging, and practical extended family. This is not only for those professed religious who live in monasteries and convents. The earliest Christians lived in ways intentionally different from other somewhat violent and power-driven ways of their secular and pagan cultures. We do well not live today as did the earliest Christians in primitive domestic sense, but rather to allow the Gospel to rather fully critique and re-make our various ways of life into styles more intelligent, wise, loving, and faith-filled than others in the modern world expect of us. Indeed, there have been experiments in utopian communisn all through history. Those attempts simply imposed oversimplified and out-of-date ideals upon more modern peoples. Too many, too, have made the sad mistake of transposing simplistic ancient cultural behaviors onto the modern world (e.g., patriarchy, the subservient roles of women, and necessary family approval before marriage even for mature grownups, and then, for marriage only to another Christian). Ancient cultural practices typically do not fit reasonably, justly, lovingly or constructively into modern ways of life. Perhaps for us, understanding that “Culture incarnates the Gospel and the Gospel critiques the culture,” it makes more sense that we sanctify today’s life-styles by allowing Gospel wisdom to guide and direct all our ways, adjusting some and canonizing others. This is hard work, but if we accept Gospel life as a vocation, i.e., a calling from God, then it is certainly worth the effort, thought, and sacrifice. The second reading today calls us to make that effort at fellowship.
The soliloquy-like prayer in today’s first lesson is from the third contributor to the Book of Isaiah (aka Trito-Isaiah or 3rd Isaiah) in the very late 500s BC. The Jews were wrestling with the complexities and challenges of restoration and reconstitution of institutional Judaism in the generations after their official liberation from the Babylonian Captivity. They had by this time actually rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple, but their spirit as God’s Chosen People needed renewal. The prophet recognized the need for a heightened dynamism and awareness. The mere status of being God’s Chosen People was insufficient. They needed to become ever more thoughtful and aware of God’s on-going salvation in their ordinary lives. They needed to increase their gratitude for and appreciation of God’s blessings, for greater personal and communal responsibility. They had been saved; they needed to live as a saved people! Their prayer can be ours!
The Gospel narrative is from what is called “The Little Apocalypse” of Mark’s Gospel, Chapter 13. Ours is not an apocalyptic church in that we no longer live with the expectation (as did the earliest Christians) that the End of the World would arrive one day soon at God’s arbitrary choosing. We moderns fully pray, hope, and expect to live long and prosperous lives, to die natural deaths, and to meet God rejoicing in the blessings this life provided. The ancient Christians expected, indeed yearned for, a more bombastic climax to the universe. In either case, the exhortation is appropriate. We are to “Be alert!” so that we can genuinely and intelligently appreciate how God has blessed us in our modern lives. We moderns engage the Gospel message rather differently than did the ancient Christians because the world has become rather different from what it once was. We ought not, we must not, live in our world as if we live in the world of the ancients. We must live in our own “here and now,” responsibly and intelligently, practically engaged in modern reality with all the wisdom and insight modern reality demands. We do, however, live in an age when fundamentalism, ignorance, bigotry, and simplistic approaches to life are increasingly socially, culturally, and politically acceptable, but they are foolishly destructive in spite of their acceptability. Thoughtful Catholic and Orthodox Christians must reject these styles and ways entirely, consciously, and boldly. In spite of our sometimes unsophisticated, apocalyptic, archaic, and even pompous liturgical language, we profess a God who is superlatively and supremely good, loving, forgiving, compassionate, wise, just, generous, and even humorous. Our God is the God of Salvation and also the God of freedom, liberty, responsible self-determination, intelligence, and understanding. Our God wants us to appreciate the ever deepening insights we have discovered about our universe, about science, wealth, beauty, justice, and human life and relationships. We must be a nuanced people, an aesthetically sophisticated people, a people who appreciate pluralism and diversity. We must “Be watchful!” and eschew all pandering to the ignorant and fearful, the hate-mongers and the narrow-minded. God has entrusted this world to us. We must treasure it and appreciate it until the day when we are called home to the Kingdom to render an accounting of the wonderful opportunities this life afforded us.
Advent is not so much that Christ is coming a second time. It is a reminder that we are going to the Kingdom of God and we ought to be prepared to do so joyfully expecting to hear that divine greeting, “Well done, good and faithful servant! Come, share your master’s joy!”