Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, 2019
Prophecy is one of the most intriguing charisms that God has given to his Church, both of the Old and the New Testaments. People are naturally inclined to have some insight into the present and future meaning of their lives, both as individuals and as a community.
The holy season of Advent gives us the opportunity of being exposed every day to the prophetic voices of the Bible in preparation for the coming of the Anointed One, the Christ of God, and the fulfillment of our hopes in him, both now and at the end of this present world. The Mass and the Divine Office, the Liturgy of the Hours, are filled at this time with prophetic longing.
The saints and faithful who were deeply formed by the spirit of the sacred scriptures understood their inspired words as true signs for interpreting their lives and the movement of God’s designs in their regard. They regarded the scriptures they heard in the liturgy and in their individual meditation as full of meaning for themselves, and even as channels of grace in their lives. Even the shortest lines of the Bible were taken as tokens, as veritable sacramentals indicating the divine will and how to accomplish it.
Among the Chosen People of old, the words of the commandment to honor God alone and to love him above all, and one’s neighbor as oneself, were fixed to their doorposts to be venerated with a kiss on going in and on going out. They were even worn in daily prayer, set up on the forehead and wrist of the man praying in little parchments kept in protective covering. Catholics are familiar with such practices in the invocations found on various holy medals and images, are worn for edification and protection from the Evil One. These are nothing other than prophetic sayings turned into prayers for the accomplishment of God’s good designs. Think of the so-called “Miraculous Medal” of Our Lady Immaculate or of the very popular medal cross of St. Benedict. This is not superstition, but rather an assertion of our confidence in God and his holy ones in carrying out our spiritual battles and struggles in this life.
Some of the saints made use of the scriptures as a way of indicating God’s will. One of the most famous and influential examples of this is found in today’s reading from St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. More than one thousand, five hundred years ago, St. Augustine was longing for the grace of conversion from his attachment to his passions, especially to unchastity. He remembered from in the life of St. Anthony of Egypt that the saint was converted to a decision for the monastic life simply by hearing a line from the Gospel sung at the liturgy. So St. Augustine picked up the codex of the New Testament, on the table beside him, and chose blindly with his index finger a random passage, the very passage we heard in the reading today:
Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the the desires of the flesh.
At these words, Augustine says, all shadows of doubt and anxiety fled away, and he was converted to a life of celibacy from a life on struggles with the illusions of impurity.
Let us choose our greatest besetting weakness and make it the theme of our hearing and reading of the prophetic word during this brief but powerful season of expectation. Each day we can read the texts presented for us for holy Mass, even if we cannot attend, and apply them precisely to whatever spiritual struggle we are undergoing. We will find that these words will provide us with insight and strength. They will feed our prayer and fill us with hope.
In the Christmas season we will follow the magi who gazed from Chaldea on the stars, looking for a sign of salvation from above. In his explanation of the six days of creation in Genesis in the Confessions, St. Augustine explains that the lights shining in the nighttime sky, the firmament, are symbols of the sacred scriptures, guiding us in the midst of this world’s darkness until the true Sun of Justice appears in all his radiant glory. Then his healing rays will complete the work of our journey guided by a star in this life’s night, and we will find, with the magi, the babe with his holy mother, born for our salvation. He is the true and only Word of God of which the prophets sang.
All these words of prophecy come straight from the heart of Jesus to our hearts; they are as much for you and me as they were for Mary and Joseph and the saints of every age. As Augustine says, God pierces our heart with the arrow of his word. If we attend to it trustingly, our celebration of the Lord’s coming at Bethlehem as well as at the end of the world will truly be a triumph in which we can join the holy angels in singing glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of good will.