1st Sunday Advent A - Homily 6

 Homily 6 - 2022 

I love today’s First Reading from the Prophet Isaiah. The Jews whom he was addressing had been experiencing exile in Babylon for about fifty years, but events unfolding on the wider world stage were giving them hope of a final return to the land of Israel. They had suffered enough; their time of punishment by God for past infidelities under their generally idolatrous kings were behind them. The founding prophecy made centuries earlier by God to Abraham might finally be coming to realisation. They would become once more a great nation through whom the foreign nations of the world would be blessed; and all would come to know and worship the one God Yahweh; and in their shared faith they would come to live together as brothers and sisters. Swords would be refashioned into ploughshares and spears into sickles. Wars would be a thing of the past.

A wonderful vision — but, not surprisingly, still awkwardly based on an understanding of God as a wonderfully merciful God who yet rewards and punishes. Their experience of love, their sense of God, needed still to mature further from a mercifully just God to an unconditionally forgiving God. Both Jews and Gentiles would need to wait a further six or seven centuries until the Word of God, the Christ, would become human in Jesus — and reveal to us the heart of God.

At the end of today’s Gospel, Matthew presented Jesus saying, “… the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” I wonder how Jesus would have felt as he said that — perhaps not unlike how he felt when he accepted the title of “King” before Pilate. A variety of prophets had referred to the coming Messiah as “king”. Early Christian writers spoke of him also as “priest”.

It was the Book of Daniel that referred to the future coming of the “Son of Man” and to his “sovereignty, glory and kingship”. Jesus identified himself as the “Son of Man” in his trial before the Jewish High Priest and the whole Sanhedrin. Just a few hours afterwards, Jesus died his tortured, tormented death by crucifixion. In doing so, he radically reinterpreted the whole idea of kingship, glory and priesthood — and of sovereignty and judgment, associated with the title of Son of Man.

Jesus had died because of his refusal to deny any elements of the message of unconditional love that he had repeatedly insisted on during his public life. He had even died murmuring, “Father, forgive them; they know what they do.”

Three days later, Jesus was raised from death to life. In all four Gospels, Jesus immediately wished forgiveness to the men who had deserted him, one of whom had even denied all knowledge of him and association with him. Remarkably, perhaps, Jesus appeared to his disciples as the crucified one. The wounds he suffered had become permanent elements of his risen body; and he made a deliberate point not only of mentioning them but of inviting the disciples to touch them — before ever a mention of repentance on their part. For Jesus, totally unconditional forgiveness was intrinsically and inseparably associated with his redefined kingship and priesthood — as is also his judging, his awareness, his knowledge. Jesus judges as a doctor judges symptoms — to be alert to past experiences and their influence on the present, not to condemn or confirm the character of the patient but to understand, to heal and to forgive.

During the two thousand years of Israelite history, the Jews gradually came to a more and more refined sense of the mystery of God’s love. Something similar can happen in us. As we grow in experience of life and love, we can come to an ever more accurately refined sense of our own and of God’s love. Eventually, we can begin to understand, to appreciate and to make our own the possibility of unconditionally loving another, and, given time, perhaps even of loving our enemies.