1st Sunday Advent C - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2012 

Advent is as good a time as any to wrestle with the questions: Where is the world heading? What sense do we make of it all? How are we going?

As we look at our world, we certainly can wonder and what's going on.  Is anyone controlling it? Governments? Global corporations? The banks?  Still, despite the efforts of some, 870 million people around the world go to bed hungry each night, and are in no position themselves to do anything about it.  Can anyone?  And if they can, are they interested in trying?  Dreadful wars as well – people being massacred, mostly innocent civilians, others growing rich through the weapons they sell and new opportunities that open up.

Look at the Church, coming under relentless scrutiny, and not shaping up well.  How many victims, their lives destroyed?  Many country parishes are struggling; and city ones facing different problems.  And God knows what is going on in many families.

What sense do we make of it? Can any sense be made of it? It is that sort of issue that the Gospel today is doing its best to come to terms with – though its reflections seem to make anything but sense to most of us.  The language and the imagery seem "way out", unfamiliar, to say the least – though, around the time of Jesus, that sort of literature had been common enough in Jewish circles for a couple of centuries.  Ostensibly, it talks about the future; but, for those in the know, it is more about different but simultaneous levels of reality.

At the level of actual history, life can be experienced as chaos – described in the then familiar imagery of signs in the skies and storm-tossed oceans and surging waves.  It is simply saying that life can indeed seem to be tumultuous.  But that is not the whole story.  Something else is going on – but that something is known only by faith.

The redeeming Christ is, in fact, powerfully at work; and through, or despite, everything else that is happening, those who are sensitive to his presence and operation can experience a wonderful sense of being free – free from all constraints that might otherwise inhibit their true human growth and their personal sense of inner peace.  Or, as the Gospel confidently put it: Whatever is going on in their lives, whatever is going on in the world around them, they manage to stand tall, heads held high, and feel themselves free from fear and sterile worry.  They are not in denial, nor overwhelmed by a sense of powerlessness, but freed, not to solve the world's problems, but to address them compassionately while living authentically.

However, that outcome is a factor of being sensitive to the presence and the action of Christ – in their own lives and in the lives of many of the people around them.  That sensitivity does not come naturally.  It has to be cultivated.  That can present problems in a world that never seems to slow down, and that powerfully and professionally is determined to distract people with all sorts of ultimately appealing attractions and unfulfilling promises.

The answer offered by today's Gospel is precisely to slow down and to be a "wake-up" to the unsatisfying, deadening and addictive consumerism that pervades our Western culture - particularly so during these weeks leading up to Christmas.  For all the hype, for all the expenditure, how many people will be happier, wiser people when Christmas has passed?

The Gospel is pretty clear.   But to grow in sensitivity to the deeper realities of life, we really do need to spend time and effort to pray – deliberately and consistently.