ADVENT REFLECTION (December 3rd, 2017 – Gospel of St. Mark 13.33-37)
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The season of Advent has a double meaning for the Church. First of all, Advent is the season when we travel backwards in time and join God’s people during the era before Christ, and, together with them, we await the birth of the Messiah at Christmas. However, Advent also has a second meaning – as the people of God who live after Christ’s coming, we are also looking forward to a future event, i.e. Christ’s Second Advent, his return in glory to judge the living and the dead and to consummate his kingdom. During the season of Advent, we are reminded of the need to orient ourselves towards the future with an attitude of hope.
Actually, since
the very beginnings of the biblical story, this attitude of expectancy for the
time when God’s restorative justice will finally bring healing to his wounded
world has been an essential part of what it means to be the people of God. Ever since the Creator’s statement in the
garden of Eden about “the offspring of the woman” who would strike the head of
the serpent, to the promise made to Abraham that he would have descendants as
numerous as the stars of the sky, to the expectation of the arrival of a
Davidic king and “the Day of the Lord” – that moment when Yahweh, the God of
Israel, would act decisively to judge pagan empires and deliver his people from
their oppression – the people of God have been in a state of expectant waiting.
In the so-called “travel narrative” of St. Luke’s Gospel (chs. 9-19), Jesus
makes his final journey to Jerusalem, telling story after story about a master
of a household or a king who goes away and leaves his servants with jobs to do;
then he comes back and judges his
servants according to their un/faithfulness in carrying out the tasks that had
been assigned to them.[1] These stories are situated in the Church’s
liturgical calendar in such a way that they
are meant to be understood as referring to Jesus’ second coming; however,
in their original context, these stories referred to the return of Yahweh to his people in order to save and judge them and
also to the vindication of Jesus, the
messenger of God who was rejected by the people he had come to warn.
Today’s Gospel is
the final section of chapter 13 of St. Mark’s
Gospel, a chapter in which Jesus has been predicting the total destruction of
Jerusalem within one generation of his own death, and Jesus is issuing warnings
to the disciples as to how they should prepare themselves for the coming
disaster. In true prophetic fashion, upon
his arrival in the city, Jesus had gone into the Temple and performed a symbolic gesture of judgment against Israel’s
national shrine – he had overthrown the tables of the moneychangers and driven
out the livestock that was for sale to the pilgrims who wanted to offer
sacrifices to God.[2] Jesus, to the surprise of his contemporaries,
announces that it is not only the pagans
who will face judgment; God’s people must also give an account of how they have responded to the call to be
stewards of the Creator’s gifts and for the example they have shown to the
other nations of the world. Jesus
predicts that when Jerusalem is destroyed, the disciples must understand this
event as being a divine act of judgment
on the nation that had rebelled against Yahweh’s way of peace and had killed
the prophets that God had sent to her. The
disciples must remain alert and watch, so as not to be caught unawares when the
time of judgment comes.
The challenge of Advent is to put
ourselves into a state of readiness for the time when evil will be judged once
and for all and all injustices will come to an end. We might wonder if there is truly a
connection between judgment and hope.
In today’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah, we can see that
judgment and salvation are intimately
linked to one another. Since we are
all sinners, i.e. we are all complicit in the evil that wounds our world, we
need to be set free from our entanglement in the world’s rebellion against the
Creator, a rebellion whose effects are all too visible. The prophet invokes the Creator as Father and Redeemer, as the potter
who shapes his people into an instrument of justice and peace. Our expectancy for the return of our Lord and
our God (cf. Jn. 20.28) does not consist of passive
waiting, but rather of active anticipation of that ultimate unveiling of
God’s justice at the return of Christ our King.
As last Sunday’s Gospel reminded us, we are called to see Jesus in those who are hungry,
destitute, alone, sick and imprisoned.[3] As Henri Nouwen said, “Life is Advent; life is
recognizing the coming of the Lord”. We
must recognize Jesus in the faces of those who are in need of hope – those who
are mourning the loss of a loved one, those who are depressed and who are
expecting to spend another Christmas alone.
Will we watch and wait, not only for
Jesus, but with Jesus this Advent
season?
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