1st Sunday Advent C - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

Stay awake! Security! How safe can you get? The threat of terrorism seems to be growing. Can anyone ever be really safe? For my own interest, I went googling yesterday. About three thousand people were killed in the “9/11” destruction of the Twin Towers. That same year in little Australia seventeen hundred people were killed on Australian roads. [Last year there were twelve hundred.] In the United States each year there is an average of about twelve thousand murders  – four times the count of “9/11”.  Can anyone ever be really safe? And do we need to be? After all, the danger of dying somehow or other, for all of us, is 100 percent. 

To cheer up his little Christian community facing possible persecution, certainly living in a constantly dangerous and threatening world, Luke quoted Jesus’ saying, “Stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand.” Perhaps it is hard to be convinced. It is true that “The Son of Man is coming in a cloud with power and great glory”; and he comes to pronounce judgment – but for him, to judge is to see our brokenness, to look at us with understanding and delicate compassion, and to choose deliberately to forgive and to love us into ever further life and freedom. The broad sweep of judgment has been made, and has only to be tailored uniquely to each of us. It need not be feared but looked forward to with hope.

We can become too offhand, of course, and live oblivious to what life is all about. As the Gospel put it, our “hearts can become coarsened with … the cares of life, etc.”. We can miss out on, even forget about, living life truly to the full. That we be loved by God is not enough unless we choose to accept that love and allow ourselves to be actively caught up into it. It all starts with God loving us. That is why Paul wrote to his Christian community in Thessalonica, “May the Lord be generous in increasing your love and make you love one another.” He insisted on that because we need to cooperate with God – or nothing happens to us.

There is another point that Paul was quite alert to – the importance of the example that we give to each other. We know the difficulty of encountering someone who acts aggressively towards us. We have to deliberately control ourselves to stop fighting back with them. Someone else’s attitude triggers the similar response in us. We instinctively mimic others. Fortunately, the dynamic also acts in reverse. Someone else’s kindness triggers a parallel response of kindness in us.

When he was first with the Thessalonian community, Paul helped them to grow as loving persons by firstly loving them; and they could remember that. It was not pride that led him to write, “Love one another … as much as we love you”, or, “Progress more in the kind of life that you are meant to live … as you learnt from us”. We need those positive interactions with each other if we are to grow in love.  We shall not succeed otherwise. And only to the extent that we grow in love, do we experience life more fully. That is essentially what Church is about. Church is a community of disciples wanting to grow in their capacity to love, and to live life – and helping each other to do it. 

We need to be alert to what is going on inside us. We need to be in touch with ourselves, and, as far as possible, with the God whom we believe first loves us, the God from whom it all starts. That is why Jesus implored his hearers, “Stay awake, praying at all times for the strength … to stand with confidence before the Son of Man.” Get to know him – and the rest follows of itself.