1st Sunday Advent A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2013

Our Church needs God.  Our world needs God.  Wonderfully, God is around; God is at work, and deeply concerned for us all.

Today we begin the season of Advent.  Advent, of course, means “coming”. In less than four weeks we shall celebrate Christmas, remembering how God first came among us, as one of us, in Jesus.  That is past history.  The Readings today reflect on the final coming of Jesus, when history as we experience it will come to its fulfilment.

The thought of Jesus’ first coming among us normally generates a joyful response.  Is our reaction to Jesus’ final coming at least as joyful?  Do we look forward to it as eagerly as we look backwards to his birth?  Perhaps, for many of us, we do not think much about it at all.  We are more preoccupied with our own death and its outcome than we are with what happens to humanity.  Our world, whatever about us, prefers not to think about either; and hesitates even to mention the word “death”.  It need not be so.

During the week, Pope Francis published a great document called “The Joy of the Good News” or “The Joy of the Gospel”.  I managed to read it quickly; and will go back to read it again more slowly, reflectively and prayerfully.  Yet, even after that quick reading, I sense a wonderful lightness and new-found hope.  In fact, I feel not unlike how I felt fifty years ago, in the early years of my priesthood, after Pope John XXIII had written his two ground-breaking encyclicals, “Mater et Magistra” and “Pacem in Terris” on the pressing issues of justice and peace; and when, not long afterwards, they were followed up by the Council’s final document on “The Church in the Modern World”.

The joyful Good News is simply, as Francis says, the fact that God loves us.  We have heard it before; but he invites us to listen this time, and to let the wonder of it sink in.  I love the way that he wrote: “one who shares the Good News must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral! Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that delightful and comforting joy of sharing the good news, even when it may be “in tears that we must sow”…

In todays’ Gospel, Jesus urged us to “Stay awake”,and to keep our eyes wide-open to reality – to the reality, simply, that God loves us and this world of ours.  In the Second Reading, St Paul went further, telling us to “wake up – now!”  He warned us against turning our backs on reality: “no drunken orgies” [how people deaden themselves to reality], “no promiscuity or licentiousness” [how people engage without love, ignorant of their dignity and potential], or worse, what Paul calls “jealousy and wrangling” [the hostility and mindless violence by which we destroy ourselves and our world].  They all, in one way or another, lead into emptiness and ultimate despair.

We are loved! We can love! That is what we were made for: “Wake up – now!” “Stay awake!”; and as Jesus added with an eye to our future destiny: “Be ready!”  Sadly, despite God’s offer and Jesus’ clear invitation, we can miss out: “One will be taken; one will be left”.  One will be taken into the embrace of God; one will be left – left to their own self-absorption, their utter emptiness and total lack of love.

There is no mystery about our final outcome.  We shall simply experience clearly, and with infinite intensity, what we are already committing ourselves to now in the myriad choices of our lives.  The choice is ours – now!  We can let the wonder of reality, of God’s love, pass us by– drugged, distracted or, worse, resistant to the way of love.  Or, we can let ourselves be loved – loved unconditionally, passionately, by God; and find ourselves wanting, empowered and swept up into that vortex of love, transformed, and loving God, ourselves and each other with the very love God has for us.