First Sunday of Advent – Year C
Luke 21: 25-28.34-36
25 Jesus said to his disciples: ‘There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars; on earth nations in agony, bewildered by the clamour of the ocean and its waves; 26 men dying of fear as they await what menaces the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. 27 And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 28 When these things begin to take place, stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand.
34 ‘Watch yourselves, or your hearts will be coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness and the cares of life, and that day will be sprung on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come down on every living man on the face of the earth. 36 Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength to survive all that is going to happen, and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.’
Be vigilant at all times and pray
Pope Francis
The Gospel of today’s liturgy, the First Sunday of Advent, speaks to us about the Lord’s coming at the end of time. Jesus announces bleak and distressing events, but precisely at this point He invites us not to be afraid. Why? Because everything will be okay? No, but because He will come. Jesus will return as He promised. This is what he says: “Stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand” (Lk 21:28). It is nice to hear this encouraging Word: stand up straight and raise our heads because right during those moments when everything seems to be coming to an end, the Lord comes to save us. We await Him with joy, even in the midst of tribulations, during life’s crises and the dramatic events of history. We await Him.
But how do we raise our heads and not become absorbed with difficulties, suffering and defeat? Jesus points the way with a strong reminder: “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy… Be vigilant at all times and pray” (Lk 21:34, 36).
“Be vigilant”: vigilance. Let us focus on this important aspect of the Christian life. From the words of Christ, we see that vigilance is tied to alertness: be alert, do not get distracted, that is, stay awake! Vigilance means this: not to allow our hearts to become lazy or our spiritual life to soften into mediocrity. Be careful because we can become “sleepy Christians” – and we know there are many Christians who are asleep, who are anesthetized by spiritual worldliness – Christians without spiritual fervor, without intensity in prayer, without enthusiasm for mission, without passion for the Gospel; Christians who always look inwards, incapable of looking to the horizon. And this leads to “dozing off”: to move things along by inertia, to fall into apathy, indifferent to everything except what is comfortable for us. This is a sad life going forward this way since there is no happiness.
We need to be vigilant so that our daily life does not become routine, and, as Jesus says, so we are not burdened by life’s anxieties (cf. v. 34). So today is a good moment to ask ourselves: what weighs on my heart? What weighs on my spirit? What makes me go to sit in the lazy chair? It is sad to see Christians “in the armchair”! What are the mediocrities that paralyze me, the vices that crush me to the ground and prevent me from raising my head? And regarding the burdens that weigh on the shoulders of our brothers and sisters, am I aware of them or indifferent to them? These are good questions to ask ourselves, because they help guard our hearts against apathy. What then is apathy? It is a great enemy of the spiritual life and also of Christian life. Apathy is a type of laziness that makes us slide into sadness, it takes away zest for life and the will to do things. It is a negative spirit that traps the soul in apathy, robbing it of its joy. It starts with sadness sliding downwards so that there is no joy. The Book of Proverbs says: “With all vigilance guard your heart, for in it are the sources of life” (Prov 4:23). Guard your heart: that means to be vigilant! Stay awake and guard your heart.
And let us add an essential ingredient: the secret to being vigilant is prayer. In fact, Jesus says: “Be vigilant at all times and pray” (Lk 21:36). Prayer is what keeps the lamp of the heart lit. This is especially true when we feel that our enthusiasm has cooled down. Prayer re-lights it, because it brings us back to God, to the center of things. Prayer reawakens the soul from sleep and focuses it on what matters, on the purpose of existence. Even during our busiest days, we must not neglect prayer. The prayer of the heart can be helpful for us, repeating often brief invocations. For example, during Advent, we could make a habit of saying, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Only these words, but repeating them: “Come, Lord Jesus”. This time of preparation leading to Christmas is beautiful: we think of the nativity scene and Christmas, so let us say from the heart: “Come, Lord Jesus”. Let us repeat this prayer all throughout the day: the soul will remain vigilant! “Come, Lord Jesus”, is a prayer we can all say together three times. “Come, Lord Jesus”, “Come, Lord Jesus”, “Come, Lord Jesus”.
And now we pray to the Madonna: may she who awaited the Lord with a vigilant heart accompany us during our Advent journey.
Angelus 28.11.2021
Jeremiah 3:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2; Luke 21:25-28,34-36
LIFE IS EXPECTATION!
Raniero Cantalamessa
Autumn is the ideal time to meditate on human things. We have before us the annual spectacle of leaves that fall from the trees. This has always been seen as an image of human destiny. “Here we are as leaves on the trees in autumn,” says the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. A generation comes, a generation goes …
But is this truly our ultimate destiny? Is it worse than the fate of these trees? After it is stripped, the tree regains its leaves in spring. But man, once he passes, never again returns. At least he does not return to this world. … Sunday’s readings help us to give an answer to this most anxious of human questions.
There was a particular scene that I remember seeing in a film or reading about it in an adventure story as a child, a scene that left a deep impression. A railroad bridge had collapsed during the night. An unsuspecting train is coming at full speed. A railroad worker standing on the tracks calls out: “Stop! Stop!” and waves a lantern to signal the danger. But the distracted engineer does not see him and plunges the train into the river. … It seems to me something of an image of contemporary society, careening frenetically to the rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll, ignoring all the warnings that come not only from the Church but from many people who feel a responsibility for the future …
With the First Sunday of Advent, a new liturgical year begins. The Gospel that will accompany us in the course of this year, Cycle C, is the Gospel of St. Luke. The Church takes the occasion of these important moments of passage — from one year to another, from one season to another — to invite us to stop for a moment and reflect and ask ourselves some essential questions: “Who are we? From whence do we come? And, above all, where are we going?”
In the readings of Sunday’s Mass, the verbs are in the future tense. In the First Reading we hear these words of Jeremiah: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah. In those days, in that time, I will raise up for David a just shoot. …” To this expectation, realized in the coming of the Messiah, the Gospel passage brings a new horizon and content which is the glorious return of Christ at the end of time. “The powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”
These are apocalyptic, catastrophic tones and images. But what we have is a message of consolation and hope. They tell us that we are not heading for an eternal void and an eternal silence but we are on our way to an encounter, an encounter with him who created us and loves us more than mother and father.
Elsewhere the Book of Revelation describes this final event of history as an entering into a wedding feast. Just recall the parable of the ten virgins who enter with the bridegroom into the banquet hall, or the image of God who, at the threshold of the life to come, waits for us to wipe away the last tear from our eyes.
From the Christian point of view, the whole of human history is one long wait. Before Christ, his coming was awaited; after him, we await his glorious return at the end of time. For just this reason the season of Advent has something very important to say to us about our lives. A great Spanish author, Calderón de la Barca, wrote a celebrated play called “Life is a Dream.” With just as much truth it must be said that life is expectation! It is interesting that this is exactly the theme of one of the most famous plays of our times: Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” …
Of a woman who is with child it is said that she is “expecting”; the offices of important persons have “waiting rooms.” But if we reflect on it, life itself is a waiting room. We get impatient when we have to wait, for a visit, for a practice. But woe to him who is no longer waiting for something. A person who no longer expects anything from life is dead. Life is expectation, but the converse is also true: Expectation is life!
What distinguishes the waiting of the believer from every other waiting; from, for example, that of the two characters who are waiting for Godot? In that play a mysterious person is awaited (who, according to some, would be God, hence, “God-ot”), without any certainty that he will really come. He was supposed to come in the morning; he sends word to say that he will come in the afternoon. In the afternoon he does not come, but surely he will come in the evening, and in the evening, perhaps tomorrow morning. … The two tramps are condemned to wait for him, they have no other alternative.
This is not how it is for the Christian. He awaits one who has already come and who walks by his side. For this reason after the First Sunday of Advent in which the final return of Christ is looked for, on the following Sundays we will hear John the Baptist who speaks of his presence among us: “In your midst,” he says, “there is one whom you do not know!” Jesus is present among us not only in the Eucharist, in the word, in the poor, in the Church … but, by grace, he lives in our hearts and the believer experiences this.
The Christian’s waiting is not empty, a letting the time pass. In Sunday’s Gospel Jesus also talks about the way that the disciples must wait, how they must conduct themselves in the meantime to not be taken by surprise: “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life. … Be vigilant at all times.”
Of these moral duties we will speak another time. Let us conclude with a memory from a film. There are two big stories about icebergs in the movies. The one is that of the Titanic, which we know well. … The other is narrated in a Kevin Kostner film of several years back, “Rapa Nui.” A legend of Easter Island, which is in the Pacific Ocean, tells of an iceberg that, in reality, is a ship and that passes close to the island every century or so. The king or hero can climb aboard and ride toward the kingdom of immortality.
There is an iceberg that runs across the course which each of us travel; it is sister death. We can pretend to not see her or to be heedless of her like the people who were enjoying themselves on that tragic night aboard the Titanic. Or we can make ourselves ready and climb onto her and let ourselves be taken to the Kingdom of the blessed. The season of Advent should also serve this purpose …
[Translation by ZENIT]
TRUE PROPHETS INSPIRE HOPE
Fernand Armellini
Dropping our arms, resigning ourselves to the overwhelming power of sin that dominates us and the world: this is a dangerous temptation. Prophets of doom are those who repeat: ‘It is not worth the effort, nothing will ever change’; ‘there is nothing to be done, evil is too strong’; ‘hunger, wars, injustice, hatred will always exist.’
They are not to be listened to. Those who, like Paul, “have assimilated the thought of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16), see reality with different eyes, glimpse the new world that is being born, and optimistically announce to all: “Right now it is sprouting, do you not see it?” (Is 43:19).
In our personal lives, we experience failures, miseries, weaknesses, infidelities. We are unable to detach ourselves from defects and bad habits. Unbridled passions dominate us; we are forced to adapt to a life of painful compromises and humiliating hypocrisies. Fears, disappointments, remorse, unhappy experiences make us unable to smile. Will it still be possible to recover confidence in ourselves and others? Will someone be able to give us back serenity, confidence, and peace?
There is no condition of slavery from which the Lord cannot free us; there is no abyss of guilt from which He does not want to lift us up. He expects that we become aware of our condition and turn to him the words of the psalmist: “From the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.”
Gospel Reflection
Faced with the dramatic and very explicit expressions with which today’s Gospel begins, one is inclined to think that Jesus is giving in advance some information about what will happen at the end of the world. This is how the text has often been interpreted, not only by the fanatics of fundamentalist sects but also, in the past, by some preachers in our churches.
The succession of events narrated is chilling: signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, the powers of the heavens being upset, and on earth the terrifying roar of the sea shaken by a frightening storm. It seems the ideal intro to the scene of the angels who, with their trumpets, come to awaken the dead and to the apparition, on the clouds of heaven, of Christ, the judge. A severe judge (it is difficult to imagine him different, knowing what the history of humankind has been, at least until today) who has come to pronounce his final verdict.
The threatening announcement of the end of the world today is less frightening: it upsets some people psychologically and makes those who should shake us, make us reflect, bring us back to reason, smile instead. If Jesus’ objective were to instill fear, he would not have reached his goal.
Jesus does not intend to arouse fear but to obtain precisely the opposite. He wants to free us from fear, arouse joy, instill hope. We will see that he is not threatening cataclysms but announcing a happy event. So let us try to understand the meaning of this challengingpassage because it uses a language that is no longer our own.
To describe a significant change, a radical transformation of the world, a decisive intervention of God, the Bible is used to employ impressive images—the so-called apocalyptic images—widely used by preachers and writers of Jesus’ time.
First, let us note that the elements mentioned (the sun, the moon, the stars, the powers of the heavens, the sea) are the same ones that appear in the creation account. The book of Genesis begins with the words: “The earth was formless and deserted, and darkness covered the deep” (Gen 1:2). No light, no form of life, all was disorder and darkness until God intervened with his word. Then the sun and the moon appeared to regularly mark the rhythms of days, nights, and seasons.
The sea—imagined by the ancients as a mythical monster—invaded the earth, but God enclosed it between two gates… he put a bolt-on it and said: ‘This far you shall come and no further, and here shall the pride of your waves be broken'” (Job 38,8-11). Thus, chaos was transformed into cosmos, and the earth became habitable for humans, animals, and plants.
In our passage, an opposite movement is announced: a return to the primordial chaos is described. The forces that maintain order in the universe are said to be disrupted; we regress to the confused, formless, and dark situation that existed before creation. The apocalyptic images used by Jesus do not refer to explosions of stars, catastrophic collisions of stars and planets but speak of what is happening today. In our world, it is becoming impossible to live; abuses and injustices are committed, there are hatred, violence, wars, inhuman conditions, nature itself is destroyed by the thoughtless exploitation of resources,and even the rhythms of time and the seasons are no longer regular.
Anguished people ask themselves: what will happen? Where will we end up? Here is the fear. Faced with the evil that dominates them and that they cannot control, people only know how to be frightened and tremble: “People will faint with fear at the mere thought of what is to come upon the world,” says today’s Gospel (v. 26). It is the terror that peoplefeel in the face of the disasters they have caused with the rejection of every ethical law, with the contempt of the most sacred values, with the loss of all moral reference points.
Is the history of humankind headed towards an inevitable catastrophe? No—Jesus assures us (and this is the central message of the passage)—but rather towards a new creation. Wherever there are signs of the disorder caused by sin, the Son of Man is to be awaited with power and great glory. His power will bring a new world out of chaos (v. 27). The danger that Jesus wants to warn against is fear and discouragement in the face of evil. He invites us to open our hearts to hope: the world dominated by injustice, wickedness, selfishness, and arrogance has come to an end, and a new one has already sprung up.
What to do while we wait? (v. 28). Although the chaos that still exists is frightening, the disciple does not stoop. He does not bow down like other people bent by anguish, stunned by fear. He stands up and raises his head. He does not wait for a prodigious intervention by God; he does not cradle in the vain hope that something might suddenly change due to some unexpected coincidence preordained by heaven.
The new world can be born from any chaotic situation; it is enough to let the word of God operate, as it happened at the beginning of creation. How many people do we see walking ‘hunched over,’ oppressed by pain and misadventures, shrunken by fear? They do not have the strength to lift their heads because they have lost all hope: the wife abandoned by her husband, the parents disappointed by the choices of their children, the professional ruined by the envy of their colleagues, those who are victims of hatred and violence, the people who feel at the mercy of their instincts…
Today’s Gospel invites everyone to ‘lift up their heads.’ There is no chaos from which God cannot create a new and wonderful world. This world comes into being the very instant we allow God to make his Advent in our lives.
Faced with the forces of evil that always seem to have the better of us, besides discouragement, there is the danger of flight, the search for palliatives, false solutions (vv.34-35). Luke—who perhaps has an eye on the behavior of some Christians in his communities—crudely lists them. He mentions first the crapola, the drunkenness. They are the symbol of all iniquity, of all the evasions and dissipations through which we try to anesthetize our disappointments and failures. These evasions are a snare (v. 35), a trap in which many people fall, become failing to meet the Lord who comes.
How can we remain awake, attentive, ready to seize the moment and the place where the Lord comes? It is very easy to get confused, be deceived, wait for him where he is not coming, and prevent him from entering (in our bad habits, in our attachment to the goods of this world, in our projects of greatness…).
There is only one way to remain vigilant: to pray (v. 36). Prayer, says Jesus, will have two effects: it will give us the strength to “escape all those things that are about to happen,” that is, it will make us see all events with God’s eyes, and it will prevent us from being seized by fear. Nothing will frighten us because we will know how to grasp in every event—happy, sad, and even dramatic—the Lord who comes, who comes to make us grow, to make us mature, to bring us closer to him.
Prayer will also allow us to stand, that is, to wait without fear for the Son of Man. It will make us ready to welcome him and leave with him towards those spaces of freedom where he wants to lead us. Prayer frees us from the corrupt mentality of this world, makingus savor and taste God’s judgment on history, and that brings us closer to people.
Advent: a time of hope and of mission
Romeo Ballan, mccj
The good news of Jesus today, as we start a new liturgical year, casts light on three situations in human and Christian existence: the real situation in which we live, the response of faith, the path followed by the believer.
1. Luke, the Evangelist, who will be our companion on the journey through this new liturgical cycle, uses powerful words (Gospel) in presenting the real-life situation of humanity “burdened by many evils” (opening prayer). He mentions nations in agony, clamour, dying of fear, bewilderment… (v. 25-26). They are evils that do not refer to the end of the world, but to the present situation of humankind, with all the negative elements in it, brought about mainly by sin which contaminates all relationships with God, with oneself, with others, with the cosmos.
2. Humanity, immersed in evil and sin, is unable to save itself; it needs a Saviour to come from outside: Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, is the Saviour who is coming. He has the power of God to break down whatever evil affects the world (v. 27). No evil, no chaos, no negative situation is stronger than He. This is the good news: delivery from evil is possible; indeed, it is close. All that is needed is to look on Him with trust: “Stand erect, hold your heads high” (v. 28). The Lord who comes has the new life of the branch that grows (1st. Reading), of life that is renewed, of a new world. The coming of the Lord is always good news: He only has “promises of goodness” (v. 14).
3. This is a dream from God, and it is possible on one condition: there is a path to follow in watchfulness and prayer (v. 36), so as not to be weighed down by the distractions and anxieties of life (v. 34), but to behave in a way that is pleasing to God (2nd Reading) and to grow in the abundance of love for each other and for all (v. 12). Today’s liturgical texts also call for vigilance, for prayer and for hope: these are characteristic attitudes of the Advent period. The waiting for the Lord who saves will not be an illusion; it will be satisfied. His Coming – each day and especially at Christmas – is always a gratifying, certain and joyous surprise.
The liturgy makes us await the Lord Jesus who comes, making us effectively experience his first coming at Christmas. The special power of the 4acraments of the Church is to make present today the Christian mysteries that took place long ago. That is how history is repeated, and becomes the story of Salvation for every single believer today. But to obtain this it is necessary that the waiting becomes attention to the Lord who is coming; that is, the patient preparation of a heart that is well-disposed and purified, aware of the needs of others, and ready to share with them its own experience of Jesus the Saviour.
Christians, who already believe in Christ, know that it is the Saviour who is coming. Non-Christians, who are still the vast majority of humanity: about two-thirds, are still awaiting the first proclamation of Christ the Saviour. So Advent is a liturgical time that is really suitable to re-awaken in Christians the awareness of their missionary responsibility. Pope Pius XII was already advocating this over 50 years ago , calling for prayer and missionary commitment, especially during Advent, which is the time of waiting for all humanity.
