1st Sunday Advent B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2020

It is good to be back once more as a flesh-and-blood congregation to celebrate together our Sunday Mass. I don’t doubt that, for many of you, the on-line Masses turned out to be quite a prayerful alternative to the real thing; and that the change of setting perhaps gave you the chance to hear better what can be sometimes lost in the sheer familiarity of our usual gatherings.

Our assembling once more may get us asking just what is special about the real thing. Different ones of you will have different answers. I hopefully believe that there are certain elements of the usual celebration that we can productively refresh and allow to stimulate our participation more fruitfully.

Sacraments are celebrations of the Christian community; and the Eucharist is both the source and the climax of them all. We need people to celebrate. Christ touches us simply through our presence to each other: knowing we are all here because of the same shared faith quietly strengthens and confirms our individual personal conviction. It is hard to be a Christian and a lone-ranger. We need the support that our being here together unobtrusively provides.

We could read the Scriptures alone at home. But hearing them proclaimed by another believer like ourselves can set up a powerful exchange. Their conviction and their enthusiasm can nourish ours, and our attentiveness can bring out the best in them. All of us grow through our shared faith in ways we hardly notice but that can be quite inspiring.

Celebrations are essentially connected to remembering. There is so much we need to remember about Jesus. It is fascinating that Jesus suggested that we gather together to share food and drink, specifically bread and wine, to remember him — particularly bread that needs to be broken to be shared and a cup that gets emptied as it is drunk. They remind us forcefully forgiveness and reconciliation, as he so often reminded us, constitute, in fact, the core of his message, and a symbolic commitment to “love one another as he loves us” — whatever our emotional reaction towards them. Our eating his body “given for us” and drinking his “blood poured out for us” give highly explicit emphasis to how seriously we are called to give witness to and to live the urgent non-negotiability of love.

Our “Amens” as we take the bread and drink from the common cup express our whole-hearted “Yes” and shared commitment to taking his message of love outwards into the general community, whatever the cost; and all is reinforced by our enthusiastic “Thanks be to God” at the end of Mass as we move off from our celebrating to engage once more with our needy world for which he died.