First Sunday of Advent: Preparing for the Coming of Christ

December 1, 2024 | Fr. Brian McDermott, S.J. | Sunday’s Readings

Tomorrow we begin the new liturgical year and celebrate the first Sunday of Advent. This season has a double focus. It invites us to preparatory prayer and to preparatory work for the long-awaited final victory of God in Christ over the horrific sway of evil in our world. And it offers our hearts the opportunity to ready themselves for the celebration of the birth of the One who, by his life, death, resurrection and the sending of his Spirit, inaugurated the first phases of that final victory.

In this season we rejoice in what God has accomplished in our history and taste the many ways in which God’s whole-making is not yet in evidence.

A front-page article in the Washington Post ten days ago offered a brutal reminder of the fact that God’s decisive victory is not yet fully accomplished. The article recounts how individuals slated for execution have exited death row in California, Texas, and North Carolina since 1976.

Of the total of 1,429 people:

• 647 were executed
• 254 died on death row
• 528 exited death row alive
• 782 are on death row awaiting execution

The text from Luke’s Gospel in this Sunday’s Mass comes from a 33-verse long section at the end of the Gospel when Jesus has finally arrived in Jerusalem and is instructing the disciples about the succession of events that will be happening in the future: beginning with his death, resurrection and ascension as the Son of Man and ending with the final victory of God over evil at an unspecified future time (or, better, end of time).

The seven verses we read are snippets of the whole discourse, the first using images of natural disorder to depict the violence of historical events that will be forthcoming and the second exhorting Jesus’ disciples not to let the dailiness of their lives dislodge them from a posture of watchfulness for the Lord’s visitations in their lives. Those visitations can take the form of interior movements giving indications of choices to be made or exterior events that need to be interpreted with the eyes of faith.

It is hard for us to recapture the urgent tone of the Gospel text. We are now solidly into the third millennium of waiting for God’s final victory over evil and the full fashioning of the new creation begun in the Christ-event. We pray without reliable images of what God’s consummation of things will look like. We labor without knowing the form God’s victory will take.

We pray and labor in hope, that is, in confident expectation, born of the love the Holy Spirit has poured into our hearts, that God will become, at the time and in the manner God chooses, God in and for all. And our hope is an expansive expectation, that God’s consummation of all things will redound as blessing for all victims in history and for all victimizers in history (who are open to that gift).

The theological virtue of hope heals and transforms our memory, understood as the interior “place” where there resides our sense of self, where we organize duration into time, and where our time and God’s eternity meet. During our lifetimes and the lifetime of our world, God labors to make blessedly whole what is now dispersed in time and space and fractured by the power of sin (St. Augustine, The Confessions, Books X and XI).

Recent events in our country have shredded all kinds of hope in the hearts of all kinds of folks. This is a time for us to go deeper, to ask for the gift of hoping beyond hopes from the Holy Spirit of Jesus who can enkindle it. We are called to show up before God as utterly needy ones, begging for this grace that God longs to give us.

We will be gifted in January with the beginning of a “Jubilee Year” dedicated to the nourishment of this precious gift of hope. Every twenty five years the Pope declares a Jubilee, a time of “fresh starts,” of going deeper into our hearts and into the embrace of Christ, that we might be renewed in our sense of ourselves as individuals and community, in the sense of how we can use our time for time’s redemption, and how we can allow God’s eternity to heal our so very fractured times.