This Sunday, the
Unexpected Jesus: Four Takeaways From the First Sunday of Advent
November 26, 2024
Photo: Pexels, Kelly.
This Sunday is the First Sunday of
Advent, Year C, and the Church’s readings ask us to prepare for Christmas
in a serious, radical way — in many ways by doing the opposite of what the rest
of the culture is doing right now.
Here are takeaways from this
week’s readings, taken from previous This Sunday posts and the Extraordinary
Story podcast.
First: Advent in the Church is
the opposite of the Secular “Holiday Season.”
December 1 in America means the
Secular Christmas Season has started. But at Mass for the First Sunday of
Advent, the liturgy sounds like the opposite of a Christmas commercial.
Ads promise the “Christmas you
deserve” but Mass begins with a prayer pleading that Christ make us worthy of
him.
Christmas at the store is “the
most wonderful time of the year,” but today’s prayer after communion
reminds us that “we walk amid passing things” and must learn to
“love the things of heaven,” not earth.
The readings get even more
pointed.
Jesus says, “Do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life,” precisely when
the world is indulging at boozy parties and stressing about the demands of
December.
St. Paul says, “Strengthen your
hearts,” and “be blameless in holiness,” while the world’s hearts are becoming
sentimental and blurring the line between Christian generosity and consumerism.
The Psalm says “the friendship of
the Lord is with those who fear him” exactly when we are focused on
nonthreatening Season’s Greetings.
How do we fight against the tide?
Jesus Christ himself gives us one way in Sunday’s Gospel.
Second: Jesus tells us that
Second Coming can teach us about the first coming.
There are always two strains in
Advent Masses: The slow preparation for the appearance of the Christ Child and
the noisy proclamations that everything is about to suddenly change.
It can almost seem like the two
are at cross-purposes, as if the Church is doing a bait and switch, making dark
promises about the end of time, and then saying, “Surprise! What the rolling
timpani and brass fanfares were really leading up to was … ‘Away in the
Manger.’”
In the readings for the First
Sunday of Advent, though, we can see very clearly the way the two are related.
“The days are coming, says the
Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made,” says the First Reading. “I will
raise up for David a just shoot; he shall do what is right and just in the
land.”
The grand fulfillment of God’s
mighty promises, he says, will be a tiny little plant: bunny food. If that
seems anticlimactic, it shouldn’t. It’s the same high drama God deploys to
great effect each spring. After a long winter, we understand how exciting a
shoot can be. And anyone who has ever had a child or grandchild knows what big
news the birth of a baby is.
The Gospel refers to an event
that hasn’t happened to this day — Christ’s second coming. But the particulars
should be very familiar to us.
“There will be signs in the sun,
the moon and the stars, and on earth nations will be in dismay,” says Christ.
“The powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
If that sounds dramatic we need to
remember how dramatic unborn children are. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. You were
bigger than the whole sky,” says a popular song that women have adopted as an
anthem to the pain of losing an unborn child. Children, even as embryos, feel
bigger than the world … because they are. That is even truer of Christ: He is
bigger than the sun, the moon, and the stars. In fact, when Jesus came, we saw
the very heavens shaken: The star of Bethlehem lit the night, and the hosts of
angels, more powerful than all the powers of the earth, filled the sky.
The baby Jesus was monumental,
splitting time and space in two.
But, third: Jesus didn’t come
to tell us how everything will end; he came to tell us how it will all begin.
Jesus paints a dire picture in
the Gospel, saying “People will die of fright.” He counsels us to “Pray that
you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand
before the Son of Man.”
Certainly these are messages
about how we have to live to be ready at the end of the world; but they are
also a description of how we have to behave to be ready for each day.
The Second Reading, from St. Paul
to the Thessalonians, was perhaps the earliest letter written in the New
Testament. In it, Paul is telling Christians how to act in the first days
of Christianity, not the last days. And he says to “abound in love for one
another and for all,” and to “strengthen your hearts, to be blameless sin
holiness” and “conduct yourselves to please God.”
It’s our duty starting on Day One
of Advent to “be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to
escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of man.”
So, fourth: Use this Advent to
know and share Jesus.
Everyone is on edge these days,
looking for truth in a world of lies, and longing to live their lives to the
full.
That’s what Advent is for: We
fast to learn the self-control we will need to live Christ’s Way; we pray to
reconfigure our hearts and minds to conform to Christ’s Truth; and we give alms
to learn generosity to live Christ’s Life.
People don’t know themselves
until they know they are loved, fully, unconditionally, by Another who really
knows them. And people don’t become themselves in full until they give themselves
away in love, fully and unconditionally, to One they accept totally.
Advent
puts Jesus before us as the object of our deepest longings. and asks us to
cooperate with his grace to become the kind of people that the Lord Jesus will
recognize when he comes.
Tom Hoopes, author of The Rosary of Saint
John Paul II and The
Fatima Family Handbook, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in
Kansas and hosts The
Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What
Pope Francis Really Said is now available on
Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, Hoopes served as
press secretary of the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent
10 years as executive editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper
and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in
Catholic publications such as Aleteia.org and
the Register. He and his wife, April, have nine children and live
in Atchison, Kansas.
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