ADVENT REFLECTION (December 3rd, 2017 – Gospel of St. Mark 13.33-37)



YOUTUBE VIDEO:

      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?



[1] E.g. Lk. 12.35-48 [cp. with today’s Gospel]; 19.11-27; 20.9-19.
[2] Cf. Mk. 11.15-18.
[3] Cf. Mt. 25.31-46.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A 40-DAY JOURNEY WITH THE KING: Lenten reflections from Mark’s Gospel (5)

Image
“A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean .”   Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean !” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean .   (Mk. 1.40-42)      Along with exorcisms, Jesus performs many healings of various physical ailments in the early chapters of Mark’s Gospel.   Jesus’ first healing is that of Simon’s mother-in-law (1.29-31).   With the restoration of the leper, we begin to understand the meaning of Jesus’ healings (and exorcisms).   The thrice-repeated word “clean” in the above passage reveals what is truly going on when the King restores the members of the people of God to wholeness.   Leprosy rendered its victim “unclean”, i.e., it proscribed that person from participation in the life of the community, of both civil society and the worship/litur...
Read more

The Protestant Reformation - good news?

Image
  The study of Reformation Europe makes many Christians wish that they had lived in the 16th century. Name 1) Some good reasons for not living in the sixteenth century and 2) Some ways in which we can live more deliberately as Christians today because of the events of that century. How should it and how should it not make a difference?    Some good reasons for not living in the 16th century include the climate of religious intolerance and violence.   Religious affiliation and observance were compulsory and imposed on the people by the state, especially it seems, in Protestant countries.   There was no freedom of conscience, except perhaps in England during the reign of Elizabeth, where the windows to people’s souls remained shut to the state, so long as they publicly conformed to the monarch’s religion (as enforced by parliament).   One may have thought that Luther’s appeal to conscience at the Diet of Worms would have inspired a broader and more sensit...
Read more

“Walking the tightrope” (St. Luke’s: Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018: Ez. 34.1-11; Ps. 23; St. Mt. 20.1-16)

Image
Ancient relevance.   Any conscientious catholic who has the habit of watching the news cannot help but notice a direct link between today’s first reading and what is going on in the Church these days.   Last week, a grand jury released a report detailing the results of their 2-year long investigation into dozens of clergymen who had abused upwards of 1,000 children in various dioceses in the state of Pennsylvania.   Every time cases of the abuse of children by priests and religious come to light, we are reminded that we live in a world – and are part of a Church – deeply infected by evil .   And of course, let’s not forget that the line between good and evil runs through each one of us (cf. Solzhenitsyn).   In today’s first reading, the prophet Ezekiel proclaims an oracle of judgment against the false “shepherds” of God’s “flock”.   Instead of caring for, protecting and nurturing God’s people , Israel’s leaders had exploited the people for their...
Read more