1st Sunday Advent C - Homily 5

Homily 5 -2018

If you feel you have heard today’s gospel before, you’re right. Only two weeks ago we had a passage from Mark’s Gospel corresponding in part to today’s first paragraph from Luke. Both, in their colorful ways, described a world where everything seemed to be falling apart. And both spoke of people’s common reaction being one of bewilderment and fear.

For those of us still coming to Church, that Gospel scenario sounds pretty familiar. So many good Catholics are worried by what is happening to the Church. Has it got a future? Will there be anyone still coming to Mass in ten or twenty years? How can it survive with so many of its leaders – priests and bishops – mired in the tragic saga of sexual abuse with its various causes and consequences, with women still being excluded from positions of real decision-making in the Church, in a world that, at least to many, seems to be presenting a greater and greater challenge to the Church’s values and way of life.

I find it fascinating to reflect on the deliberate response that both Gospel passages encouraged disciples then, and us today, to adopt – not fear, but its opposite: “Stand erect, hold your heads high”, not in desperation or defiance, but in joyful expectation and peaceful confidence. How come?

Today’s Gospel gives an amazingly reassuring answer that is quite surprising, and even counter-intuitive. It maintains that, however people interpret current events and trends, what is really happening is that, as it poetically expressed it, “the Son of Man is coming in a cloud with power and great glory”. The Gospel speaks of this coming of the Son of Man as sudden, but the intensity conveyed by the word sudden refers to urgency rather than to speed. Elsewhere the Gospel makes it clear that the Son of Man’s presence in our world is happening already. [Matthew’s Gospel concludes with the magisterial statement, “I am with you always, till the end of time”.] What the passage does not say, but that Jesus had repeatedly stated earlier, and clearly presupposed here, is that really to see what is even now truly happening, we need ‘eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand’.

Sadly, in the face of the current crisis facing the Church, many people seem to be more inclined to move into either fear or into psychological avoidance and denial than to make the continued effort to convert. As the Gospel warned, our hearts can be too easily bewildered or frightened on the one hand or “coarsened with debauchery and drunkenness” or even simply with “the cares of life”, on the other.

In order that we find “the strength to survive all that is going to happen and to stand with confidence before the Son of Man”, Jesus insisted on two things: that we “stay awake at all times” and that we “pray”.

To the extent that we “stay awake”, that we learn to keep our eyes open and our hearts attuned, we shall come personally to experience that “our liberation is near at hand”. The whole context would seem to indicate liberation from the common cultural mindset with its consequent behaviours, and the blindness and worldview they result from.

When Jesus talked of prayer, I think he meant more than simply “praying for..”. He meant the kind of prayer that changes our lives, and the ways we think and act. Our recent Catholic culture has done very little to expose people to the wonderful ways of praying that were common in an earlier period – the kind of prayer that does not rely on words so much but rather engages our minds and hearts, the kind of prayer that Mary prayed, the prayer that finds God in stillness and seeming emptiness and absence, and that learns the presence and the ways of God more through silence and quiet reflection than an abundance of words.