Today’s gospel is Luke’s version
of the one we had from Mark two weeks ago.
We are invited to look again
at the culmination of this created world.
However, this time,
at the start of Advent,
the emphasis is different.
This is the season of waiting, of longing, of expectation.
This is the season for sustained reflection on,
for praying about,
for expressing gratitude for
Christian Hope.
That is the perspective that we bring to today’s gospel.
Christian hope is one of the three great gifts,
that bear directly on our friendship with God.
The others are faith and love.
Christian hope is not the same as human hoping.
Rather,
Christian hope purifies our human hopes and aspirations
to direct them towards God’s Kingdom;
it keeps us from discouragement;
it sustains us in difficulty;
it excites us about
the prospect of God’s work being finished in us
the prospect of experiencing and acknowledging God’s love,
the prospect of life in God’s presence.
Today, we start a liturgical and reflective journey
up to Christmas day,
on through the Epiphany,
right to the end of Christmastide
on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on January 10th.
The journey’s centrepiece is that:
“The Word became flesh”
For, in Jesus,
God identifies wholeheartedly with out human condition.
God shares our humanity
God is incarnate.
Therefore, we should expect our fundamental, human experiences
to provide opportunities for deep spiritual insight.
There are a few such experiences that we all share:
Everyone is someone’s child;
everyone faces mortality;
Other experiences not shared by all:
Only some marry
Only some become parents
Only some become fathers
These human realities provide real and deep spiritual insights,
firstly for the person themselves and then for those close by.
Let me clear,
I am not talking about insights into the particular situation,
– into what it is like to be a father, for example –
I mean insights into bigger,
harder to pin-down,
more abstract sounding, realities
like joy and love.
And, I don’t mean intellectual insights,
I mean the insights of the heart,
where our feelings, our desires,
the reaction of our whole humanity, our whole person,
is a revelation for us.
My experience of being a father,
the way I feel about my children,
is a direct, immediate, insight,
an insight of the heart,
into the fatherly love God has for them,
and then for everyone.
The human experience that provides the deepest insights into advent,
that, I believe, underpins the Church’s sense of the season
and that should guide us in reflection on its themes
is an experience not open to all,
it is being pregnant,
particularly, I’d guess,
the second half of a first pregnancy.
It is an annual time for those who have given birth
to draw on the lived experience of pregnancy
to speak to the heart
with insight, into expectation, into waiting, into longing,
into looking forward to a completion.
And, if you can,
for not everyone can speak easily about these things,
to share what you learn with those of us
who have not had the direct experience.
In Advent the Church sees:
Mary pregnant, waiting, feeling the changes,
journeying into a future only glimpsed.
However, the Church points to other pregnancies:
The pregnancy of the Chosen People in the Old Testament.
A people struggling to understand their relationship with God
longing for God to reveal himself fully to them
and to their neighbours.
A people that will give birth to Jesus.
However the main focus today is that
the whole Church on earth is pregnant,
we are pregnant,
we are in an in-between time
we know what God has done in Jesus
we are bearers of that news,
we are followers of his way,
trying to live by his example,
Jesus work is done,
humanity is raised up, dignified, divinised,
but this is known now by faith,
it is not yet fully visible,
and our sharing in that mystery is not complete.
One day it will be.
The material world will have run its course
and faith will be no more,
we will see plainly,
we will be liberated,
we will truly know
and be overwhelmed by
God’s love.
This is the final ‘birth’,
which we are all to look forward to, long for.
Today Jesus tells us to pray for
‘the strength to survive what will happen
and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man’
I don’t think is a prayer for a long life.
It is a prayer for Christian Hope,
A prayer that our confidence
in the final triumph of grace
is not overcome by
what we find
meaningless,
disordered and loveless,
in this material world.
First and foremost, this is a communal, a community prayer:
a prayer by the whole church on behalf of everyone,
and in a particular way
for those whose circumstances are testing their confidence in God’s goodness and grace,
and for those near death.
But also as individuals,
we make the prayer for ourselves,
acknowledging before God,
that all has been reconciled in Jesus,
that in the end this will be made plain.
This prayer is not supposed to be abstract and distant,
It is supposed to have real relationship with our day-to-day lives.
Christian hope is that:
whatever the appearances to the contrary here and now,
whatever bad things happen,
whatever difficulties we face,
whatever wrong we see,
we are confident that grace has ultimate victory,
that sin and death are vanquished in Jesus.
We practice ‘standing with confidence’
every time we come to Mass.
We come before the risen glorified Lord,
under the appearances of bread and wine
not casually,
not self-confidently,
not presumptuously,
but
remorseful for our failings
grateful for the gifts we have received
confident in God’s love and forgiveness, shown in Jesus.
We can be confident before
Jesus, the Son of Man,
for even as we encounter him in glory
as we worship him as God,
he is,
as the figure behind me reminds us,
human:
he extends his arms in embrace of us
and he is marked eternally,
with wounds revealing the depths of his love.