ADVENT REFLECTIONS III

"God Comes" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First Sunday of Advent Pope Benedict XVI in his homily celebration of First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent (Saturday, 2 December 2006) said, "At the beginning of a new yearly cycle, the liturgy invites the Church to renew her proclamation to all the peoples and sums it up in two words ‘God comes.’ These words, so concise, contain an ever new evocative power. Let us pause a moment to reflect: it is not used in the past tense—God has come, nor in the future—God will come, but in the present—‘God comes.’ At a closer look, this is a continuous present, that is, an ever-continuous action: it happened, it is happening now and it will happen again. In whichever moment, ‘God comes.’ The verb ‘to come’ appears here as a theological verb, indeed theological, since it says something about God’s very nature. Proclaiming that ‘God comes’ is equivalent, therefore, to simply announcing God himself, through one of his essential and qualifying features: his being the God-who-comes. Advent calls believers to become aware of this truth and to act accordingly. It rings out as a salutary appeal in the days, weeks and months that repeat: Awaken! Remember that God comes! Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now! The one true God, ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,’ is not a God who is there in Heaven, unconcerned with us and our history, but he is the-God-who-comes. He is a Father who never stops thinking of us and, in the extreme respect of our freedom, desires to meet us and visit us; he wants to come, to dwell among us, to stay with us. His ‘coming’ is motivated by the desire to free us from evil and death, from all that prevents our true happiness. God comes to save us. The Fathers of the Church observe that the ‘coming’ of God—continuous and, as it were, co-natural with his very being—is centered in the two principal comings of Christ: his Incarnation and his glorious return at the end of time (cf. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis 15,1: PG 33, 870). The Advent Season lives the whole of this polarity. In the first days, the accent falls on the expectation of the Lord’s Final Coming, as the texts of this evening’s celebration demonstrate. With Christmas approaching, the dominant note instead is on the commemoration of the event at Bethlehem, so that we may recognize it as the ‘fullness of time.’ Between these two ‘manifested’ comings it is possible to identify a third, which St. Bernard calls ‘intermediate’ and ‘hidden,’ and which occurs in the souls of believers and, as it were, builds a ‘bridge’ between the first and the last coming." Joy is the True Gift of Christmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pope Benedict XVI (12/18/05) Pope Benedict XVI (12/18/05) commenting on the scene of the Annunciation as recounted in today’s Gospel (4th Sunday of Advent). "With the angel’s greeting to Mary —‘kaire’ in the Greek, which means ‘be joyful’—the New Testament begins," he said. "We could say that the first word of the New Testament is ‘be joyful,’ ‘be happy,’ in other words, ‘joy.’ This is the true meaning of Christmas: God is near us, so near that He became a child." The Holy Father then highlighted how "we realize that today’s world, where God is absent, is dominated by fear, by uncertainty." Nonetheless, "the words ‘be joyful because God is with you and with us,’ truly open a new time." "Joy is the true gift of Christmas, not the expensive gifts that call for time and money. We can communicate this joy simply: with a smile, a kind gesture, a little help, forgiveness. And the joy we give will certainly come back to us.…Let us pray that this presence of the liberating joy of God shines forth in our lives." The Christmas Mystery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adrian Nocent, OSB, The Liturgical Year: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, Collegeville, MN. Liturgical Press, 1977 p. 182 "…God became man, not so that he might be with us, but so that we might be with him. In other words, the incarnation is the starting point of our divinization.…It comes about so that, having become in a sense ‘divine,' we may be capable of effectively working with Christ to rebuild the world for the glory of the father. We are thus not passive bystanders at the incarnation. The incarnation radically transforms the history of the world and the personal history of each of us. Because of it, each of us must measure up to God's plan and play his proper role in it." p. 191 "…What Christmas renders present is the starting point of our salvation; it is ordered toward our redemption, which it already contains. The introduction of the crèche and all the Christmas folklore has been a good thing, and neither can nor should be simply rejected. We must admit, however, that the injection of these elements, especially at a time when both the liturgy and the knowledge of Scripture were in decline, has turned Christmas, for many, into the feast of tender piety; midnight Mass is the most important thing to these Christians, and the feast has no further influence on their lives." p. 218 "The birth of Christ destroys the effects of death, and causes new life to be reborn in us, man is regenerated by Christ's coming as man. This new life consists in our sharing the divine nature. Here again, the Church in her liturgy has been guided by the theology of the Fathers. In the patristic reading for the Office of Readings on Christmas, St. Leo bids us thank God through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because ‘in his loving mercy he took pity on us, and when we were dead because of sin, he gave us life with Christ so that in Christ we might be a new creation, a new work of his hands.' He then utters the well-known exclamation: ‘Christian, recognize your true dignity, and now that you have become a sharer in the divine nature, do not return to your earlier degradation through evil ways.' The liturgy links the birth of Christ with a renovation, or renewal, with our generation, or birth, and with a novitas, or newness of life, as opposed to a vetustas, or decrepitude (the state of one who is worn, decayed, old, and feeble)." p. 220 "The renewal that Christ's birth effects is not to be thought of as restricted to intelligent beings. The whole of creation benefits from the re-creation that is the fruit of Christ's suffering and resurrection and that is already implicitly contained in his birth. St. Paul told the Ephesians that the aim of God's love-inspired plan was ‘to unite all things in him [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth' (Eph. 1:10)." "…This theme, which has become part of the Eucharistic liturgy, is the best expression we have of the glorification of the cosmos. The whole of creation, and not man alone, experiences the regenerative power of the incarnation." "…we must realize that his [Christ's] presence is a consecration of the world. The world was of course already consecrated to a degree, since God was the one who had made it, but the presence of the Word within the cosmos restores its dignity and gives it the possibility of rebuilding itself with the elements already at its disposal."