3rd. Sunday of Advent (B)
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The great
prophet Isaiah spoke most assuredly about God’s coming work of salvation in Israel,
and in today’s reading he tells of figures yet to come:
I
rejoice heartily in the LORD, in my God is the joy of my soul; for He has
clothed me with a robe of salvation, and wrapped me in a mantle of justice.
Who was Isaiah foreshadowing there? Who would be able to speak like that? Surely, only Our Lord Jesus Christ, speaking of
His humanity.
Isaiah then went on:
Like
a bride bedecked with her jewels.
He speaks there of Mary of Nazareth, bedecked with the
blessings of her Immaculate Conception.
And the ultimate reason for all this rejoicing? It is indeed a most sublime reason,
pre-eminently worthy of such rejoicing, because it fulfils and answers both the
loving purpose of Our God, and mankind’s deepest longing since being cast out
of Eden and away from God’s presence:
The Lord God will make
justice and praise spring up before all the nations.
And yet, when that promised Coming One -- Son of the Virgin
Mother -- was about to begin His work of making ‘justice and praise spring up’,
the greatest of all the prophets, John the Baptist who was uniquely close to our
Blessed Lord Jesus on the very cusp of Israel’s fulfilment, found himself
confirming Isaiah’s prophecy by making use of much more sober language in order
to reveal with all clarity a truly disconcerting reality:
I am the voice of one crying out
in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord; for there is One among you
Whom you do not recognize, the One coming after me, Whose sandal strap I am not
worthy to untie.
That is
the setting for our Advent preparations to welcome the Lord coming to His
spouse -- Mother Church – this Christmas to make her more like ‘a
bride bedecked with jewels’.
Dear People of God, look all around you
this Advent time at the great majority of Christmas celebrations and you will
have no doubt about the truth of the Baptist’s words:
There is One among you Whom you do not recognize.
Why is Jesus
not recognized today by those, so many of them, who were formerly professing
Catholics or Christians? It is, to a
certain extent, because many have succumbed to the lure and enticements of
popular sin, or have fainted or despaired under the burden of personal and worldly
cares.
There is,
however, another cause for Jesus being unrecognizable for too many of our
fellows, be they nominal Catholics or Christians or just present-day
unbelievers, and that is because they
have long been out of touch with, and have become unaware of and
insensitive to, the Jesus of Mother Church’s teaching and tradition.
Dear Catholic
People of God, as Catholics we are the original Christians, members of the
original body established by Jesus as His Church on the foundations of His
Personally chosen and endowed Apostles, to whom He uniquely said:
I
no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is
doing. I have called you friends, because I have told YOU everything I
have heard from My Father. (John
15:15)
Moreover, He promised those original Twelve:
The Advocate, the Holy
Spirit that the Father will send in My name — He will teach you everything
and remind you of all that (I) told you. (John 14:26)
Those original Apostles are thus the source of Mother Church’s doctrinal teaching and traditions, and it
is absolutely necessary that those Apostolic memories of Jesus’ words,
addressed Personally and directly to them as His friends for the good of
further friends to come through their ministry, that those Apostolic traditions
learned from Jesus’ very actions and attitudes witnessed by their own eyes and
heard by their own ears, remain intact and appreciated in Mother Church
today. No one -- not even Pope -- can sever
us from Jesus’ love and guidance handed down through the ages in those Apostolic doctrines and traditions.
There are difficulties today for a faithless generation wanting to
justify itself and confirm its worldly popularity: it tries to confuse
issues by subtly ‘updating’ texts, by teaching in accordance with modern
preferences while, on the other hand, simply trying to consign to oblivion what
cannot be thus ‘updated’.
This is due to the fact that (as Jesus Himself said, John
14:17):
This is the Spirit of Truth, Whom the world
cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him,
because He abides with you, and He will be in you.
The world cannot receive the Spirit of Truth
because it does not, will not, believe in Jesus:
And
when He (the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth) comes,
He will convict the world in regard to sin, because they do not believe in
Me. (John 16:8–9)
The Apostles, on the other hand, know the Spirit of
Truth, because He already abides with
them as the future Catholic (universal) Church of Jesus, and will be in them individually, as faithful
disciples of and witnesses to Jesus their Lord, their Master, and their Saviour.
The season of Advent is a time of great expectancy, because
we are looking forward to the coming of Our Lord and Saviour; and, being
certain that His coming anew this Christmas will be for our blessing, we beseech
His most Holy Spirit to prepare us to welcome Him with hearts and minds authentically
attuned to Him in the Apostolic purity of Mother Church’s teaching and traditions.
We are also aware that at the appointed time -- we do not
know when -- He will come in glory to judge the world, to triumph over all His
enemies and cast out Satan; and then, after having ultimately established the
Kingdom of God, He will lead all His faithful ones to worship, and rejoice in,
the supreme Lordship of His Father. This is what St. Paul explained when
writing his first letter to his converts in the great Greek seaport of Corinth:
As in Adam all die, even so in
Christ all shall be made alive. But
each one in his own order: Christ the first-fruits, afterward those who are
Christ's at His coming. Then comes the
end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all
rule and all authority and power. For,
He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet; the last enemy that
will be destroyed is death, for, "He has put all things under His
feet." (1 Corinthians
15:22-26)
This season of Advent is, consequently, a time of joyful
expectancy, because the true disciple of Jesus, although being fully aware of
his human weakness, ignorance, and personal sinfulness, nevertheless, most
assuredly hopes and trusts that he will ultimately be purified of that
sinfulness and called to share in His Lord’s heavenly glory and experience
with Him eternal blessedness in His Father’s Kingdom, for Isaiah (40:10)
rightly spoke of the Lord God coming to His People with an abundance of
blessings:
Behold, the Lord God will come
with might; behold, His reward is with Him and His recompense before Him.
And therefore, even now this very day, all true disciples
of Jesus can share, take part in -- with all confidence and simplicity, humility and
sincerity -- that blessing enshrined in Isaiah’s great oracle:
I rejoice heartily in the Lord, in my GOD IS THE JOY
OF MY SOUL.
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