Year C / Advent / Week 1 / Sunday
Readings: Jeremiah 33.14-16 / Ps 24. 4-5ab, 8-9, 10, 14 (R/v 1b) / Thessalonians 3.12-4.2 / Luke 21.25-28, 34-36.
Sisters and brothers, I wonder if we are really excited about the coming Christmas and thankful for the Advent season to prepare for it?
Excited and thankful that we might have already decorated the house, been listening to Christmas carols or even singing them, like this one:
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.
Soon and very soon, we are going to see the Lord.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the Lord.
For me, this song echoes the expectant promise in the opening line of today’s readings: “The days are surely coming”.
These are Advent days. Days of anticipation. Days we should be focused on promised beginnings. There is something mysterious about the promises in our first reading. Something good is coming. Something to do with justice and righteousness. Something or someone who will make these promises real.
Advent invites us to be watchful for this coming, to prepare for it, to welcome it.
And the final line of our readings today in the gospel tells us who we are to look out for and how to welcome him. “To stand with confidence before the Son of Man”.
We often think of standing before the Son of Man as a future reality: in death, when God will judge us. But “To stand with confidence before the Son of Man” is also a most appropriate image to begin our Advent preparations with. After all, shouldn’t everything we do in Advent lead us to stand before the infant Jesus in the manger on Christmas morning? Stand to adore him?
The reality of standing before the baby Jesus invites us to consider if this is not how we as Christians ought to live daily. To daily stand before God with the honestly that this is who we are, with all that is good, saintly and bright and all that is bad, sinful and dark about us. More significantly, to stand like this so as to give God permission to stand before us and to love us even more?
If your answer is ‘yes’ then you know why this call to stand with confidence is indeed an Advent grace.
It is because Advent time helps us again to stand erect, to stand watchful, to keep a look out for, indeed to look ahead to the Son of Man who will come. Surely come to us in our difficult, painful, trying times, even if they are the end times, because he is our redemption, as the gospel proclaims.
This is why Advent invites us to look forward by looking back to God’s promised saviour. In the first reading, Jeremiah reminds us that he will come from David’s line. He will come to do what is right and just in the land so he can secure us and make us safe.
The prophet Isaiah tells us the many names by which we will know this child: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” The evangelist Matthew calls him Emmanuel to remind us that he is indeed God-with-us.
All of us call him simply and truly, Jesus.
In faith, we know Jesus has already come. He has lived amongst us and loved us onto death to save us. In rising from the dead, he has given us his Spirit to live fully in love with God and with neighbour. His story is the history of our salvation. Our salvation is however not complete; it awaits our fulfillment in the here and now, even as we await Jesus’ second coming.
Today Jesus is calling us to do this in the gospel. We are to be vigilant, to pray, and not to be drowsy from carousing and drunkenness. We are to prepare ourselves to stand before Jesus, not only with confidence but with the honesty of who we are for him to love us in judgment.
And he will judge us not only as God but as one who has lived like us in all ways but sin. One who knows what and how it is to be fully human, fully living, fully loving. One who is truly concerned about us, as only a fellow human being can be—loving what is human and life-giving in each of us, even if our failings, faults, and flaws make us less human in our sinfulness.
All of our Christian life is to prepare us to stand with confidence before him whose face reveals God and mercy that is God’s name.
Aren’t we blessed that this is the kind of judge we have?
Advent teaches us how to stand in the present as we await Jesus’ coming. We learn to stand now so that we can stand confidently on that day when we have to stand at our judgment. Then, we can stand as we are before Jesus who is our saviour. This is the hope Advent calls us to celebrate.
To welcome this Jesus is indeed the reason for our Advent preparations.
In the next four weeks, many of us will busy ourselves. We will shop for presents. We will bake our cookies and sweets. The children will trim the Christmas tree with friends and family. So many of us will even bring Christmas cheer to the lesser among us.
But let us also make these Advent weeks more of a graced time for our spiritual conversion and renewal. A time to right the wrongs in our lives, and to make room – within us and amongst us – for Jesus at Christmas.
I believe we can do all these if we but let the grace of Advent work in us. This grace that teaches us once again to how we can stand before God daily so that we can better stand before Jesus who is God-with-us at Christmas.
And why would we want to stand before Jesus? Because of what we will see and hear.
We long to look at Jesus’ face to see how he has first gazed upon us and loved us from sin into life. And in doing so, we will know that Jesus has done this through every human face we have encountered. The face of an innocent babe gurgling at us. The weary, anxious faces of the poor thanking us for our help. The tear-streaked faces of sinners we’ve embraced. Even the surprised faces of enemies we’ve forgiven.
Indeed, Jesus continues to love us through the countless faces we live and work with, we play and pray with, we love and are loved by.
And in Jesus’ countenance, we shall also see the faces of everyone who has been good and kind and gracious to us, and all whom we have done likewise too, looking back at us, and loving us even more too.
Then, if we quietened ourselves as we stand to look at Jesus’ comely face, we might hear him say, “because you forgave your spouse, you loved your children, you consoled your friend, you uplifted a stranger, you welcome another in need, you reached out to your enemy, you mercifully cared for the least of my sisters and my brothers – you did all these to me.”
Indeed, his voice, rich in love and tender in mercy, will come from a face like yours and mine. And his words will not fade away: they will simply fill our very being, giving us life, again and again, and empowering us to love selflessly always. This is St Paul’s prayer in the second reading for all who see and know Jesus: “may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all”.
Indeed, how can we not lift up our faces this Advent towards that face of Jesus, Son of Man and beloved Son of God?
We can with the confidence of being the forgiven, of being of the living God has chosen in love, and of being the blessed who God wants us to look ahead to Jesus, our redemption.
Maybe when we embrace this confidence, we will come to that lowly manger on Christmas morning, and we stand gratefully before the infant Jesus lying in it. Stand to adore Jesus, but, more so, to stand with greater wonder and much more gladness, to say to our God, “Thank you” for Jesus.
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: REUTERS/Stephanie Keith, 7 Jan 2017
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