Advent I

The First Sunday of Advent

_{Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7; Psalm 80; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:33-37}

Why do you let us wander, O God and harden our hearts?There is none who calls upon your name,who rouses themselves to cling to you.You are angry.  You have hidden your face from us…delivered us up to our guilt.

Complaining, blaming, crying out…what kind of Advent is this?

The words of Isaiah grate. So does the Gospel of Mark. Mark does not have time for Christmas. He is not writing a heart-warming story. He is writing to a church in crisis. Palestine has revolted and the patience of Rome is exhausted. When her armies are finished, Jerusalem will have been destroyed and the people scattered. Christians are viewed with contempt. Swept up in Emperor Nero’s persecution, the Christian community is rightly terrified of what is to come.

Crisis – complaining – blaming – fear.

How many contemporary situations and emotions are reflected in the words and attitudes of Isaiah and Mark?

We have been conditioned at this time of the year to think happy thoughts and prepare for the cosmic celebration of the nativity of the Christ. And therein lies a vast chasm between Isaiah, Mark and ourselves, between the Word of God and the words of advertisers, between reality and the superficiality of our culture, between the God we have created in our own image and God as God is revealed to us.  Can this chasm, should this chasm, be bridged?

The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton reminds us, “Our Advent faith is not an escape from the world to a misty realm of slogans and comforts which declare our problems to be unreal, our tragedies inexistent.” God does not call us to flee from this imperfect and hurting world but enter more deeply into it. It is into this world, our present world situation, that we are to work for social justice and peace.

Merton explains: “[O]ur task is to seek and find Christ in our world as it is, and not as it might be” or as we would like it to be.

Thus, instead of encountering a sleeping baby in a manger, we are confronted with 6,000 children killed in the Israeli – Hamas war.

Instead of angels singing to God’s glory, we hear words of hate against Jews, LGBTQ+ people and Muslims.

Instead of the glory of the Lord brightly shining in the heavens, we are beguiled by the flares that light up the sky in the bombing of Ukraine and Gaza.

Instead of expensive gifts from magi, we are confronted with families trying to make ends meet.

Instead of peace on earth, we are confronted with the shooting of three college students in Vermont.

Instead of the welcoming of strangers in the guise of shepherds and magi, we are confronted with tens of thousands of refugees moving across the globe.

Instead of images of a crowded heaven of angels and crèches filled with animals and shepherds, we are confronted by hunger and loneliness in our country.

Advent is not meant to draw our focus away from this world and all that disturbs us about it; from its violence, deprivation, and exclusion. Instead, Advent is a time to remember that God willingly entered this world as a vulnerable human being and continues to enter this world embracing the most vulnerable and precarious of people, the marginalized and forgotten, the voiceless and disdained, by becoming one of them, one of us.

In seeking and finding Christ in our world as it is lies authentic Christian hope. Hope in a God who tears open the heavens and comes down accomplishing deeds we could not hope for.

At Jesus’ baptism, Mark will quote Isaiah. The heavens he insists are torn open for the Spirit to descend. Is it Pentecost?

Characterized by a sense of urgent desperation and haste, Mark’s Gospel has no time for Christmas. There is this conflict between good and evil and a victory that must be accomplished. Thus, Mark impels us throughout his Gospel toward the salvation of the Cross. The badgered complaining and blaming of God in Isaiah is broken by cries of hope: Return for the sake of your servants. Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, with the mountains quaking before you. Would that you might meet us doing right. Yet, O LORD, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands.

This hope arises from our recognition that Christ draws near to us in our brokenness, loneliness and suffering. What is uncertain is not the “coming” of Christ but our own reception of him, our own response to him, our own readiness and capacity to “go forth and meet Him” in the broken people of our world.

_{National Catholic Reporter, What is the meaning of Advent in our broken world? by Daniel P. Horan, 30 November 2023.}

_{America, The Jesuit Review, St. Mark is so over Christmas by Terrance Klein, 29 November 2023.}