1st Sunday Advent A - Homily 5

 Homily 5 - 2018

As I get older, I am slowing down; but I still like to walk around the lake on three mornings or so most weeks. Depending on the time of the year, my walk can start with the sun just below the horizon, and before I am halfway round, it has slowly risen and become visible through the rising mist across the lake. Some mornings, most mornings, the experience is quite magic as I share it with the magpies and the water hens and the occasional frog. The moments I like best are before the actual sunrise, when the sky and the clouds so often are coloured in brilliant orange or various shades of red.

At the moment, despite the impatience of most shopkeepers, the Feast of Christmas is just below our horizon – but it is close. For me, with no family, I find this period of Advent more beautiful, more fulfilling, than the coming feast itself – like the dawn before the sunrise. The Scripture Readings, so many taken from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, I find quite fascinating – so hope-filled and graphically expressed, like poetry.

Today’s first Reading is a case in point: “swords into ploughshares … spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war. O House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

The Gospel today, at first sight, seems more sombre: “the Son of Man comes … the Son of Man comes … the Son of man is coming”, with its repeated counsel, “Stay awake … stand ready.” In the Gospel itself, just before today’s passage, there is a clear reference to a vision of the prophet Daniel who wrote, “They will see the Son of Man coming with power and great glory”. How do you hear it? as threat or as promise?

You might remember from our Palm Sunday readings of the Passion how Matthew wrote that immediately after Jesus died, “the veil of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom; the earth quaked; the rocks were split; the tombs opened and the bodies of many holy men rose from the dead..”. Somewhat cryptically, Matthew seems to have wanted to show Jesus’ death as the mythical moment of the coming of the Son of Man.

We know ourselves that, according to Jesus himself, the only power that gives life is the power of love, exemplified so conclusively in the love that motivated his dying on the cross. There in his death he expressed the life-giving power of God, and, the same time, revealed the heart of God. So Isaiah’s yearning was spot on when he wrote – “there will be no more training for war ... Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord”.

So, what might “staying awake, standing ready” involve on our part? Standing ready: perhaps each of us needs to take time to tune in to the Spirit of God in order to hear what the Spirit is saying, personally tailor-made, to us. That is the point, after all, of this expectant season of Advent. Staying awake: perhaps practising to see and to appreciate the presence of the Son of Man already at work in our world, wherever we see love at work – in our own lives and in the lives of others.

Our institutional Church may be battered and war-wearied. Let’s hope we accept being humbled, and hopefully grow in humility. But at the same time, let us keep our hopes high by seeing and welcoming love everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.

Let me finish with a quotation from my favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

“ … Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces”.

Happy Advent!