“The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise.” So says Jeremiah in the first words of Scripture we hear in a new liturgical year. The promise is actually twofold — God’s presence with his people in this world and his people’s presence with him in eternity. The promise is fulfilled with Emmanuel, “God with us.”
And so it begins again. Advent is a season of complex reality. We prepare ourselves to celebrate the feast of Christmas, the nativity of Jesus born in time. We celebrate the presence of Jesus in the sacraments and the Church. We also look ahead to a day and a time we do not know, the time of culmination when Jesus will come to us in glory, as the traditional formulation puts it, to judge the living and the dead. We also focus on a different Gospel. Instead of the abrupt stridency of the Gospel of Mark, we move into the more measured tones of Luke’s writing. According to tradition, Luke was a physician. He was aware that Jesus brought healing of both body and spirit to the people of his own time and the people of the Church that began with the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Traditionally, the church only gives us the words of Jesus on the First Sunday of Advent. After hearing about John the Baptist for the next two Sundays, we begin to tell the story of Christmas by relating Mary’s acceptance of God’s plan and the events that led to the birth of Jesus. We even hear stories of his infancy and childhood before we hear of the first appearance of the adult Jesus at his baptism. We won’t hear from Jesus again until the middle of January, but he tells us something very important today, something that fits well with Luke the physician and his knowledge of what people need to be healthy. It comes right in the middle of one of those apocryphal statements about the end of time.
“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life,” Jesus says to us. He wants us to avoid the extremes of escape and worry. If we are to “be vigilant at all times,” we have to be conscious and aware of what is going on around us. Luke and Jesus don’t want us to be stupefied or paralyzed as we begin this Advent season. If we are, we might not notice the presence of God around us.
Perhaps the best way to do this is to follow the exhortation of Paul to “increase and abound in love for one another and for all. When we love, we are attentive to others and grounded in reality because our love is meant to be an act of service. We can’t be buried in foolishness or fear when we strive to “conduct ourselves to please God.”
God bless you!
Father Phil Cyscon
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