Meditation on Advent: The Lord is Coming!

MEDITATION ON ADVENT: THE LORD IS COMING!
Advent and Lent are the most important seasons of the liturgical year: both prepare us for the greatest feasts of Christianity. While Lent is the time of penance and prepares Christians for Easter, Advent is the time of hope and prepares the believers in Jesus for his different comings to us.
Advent means “coming,” “arriving.” Who is coming? Jesus! Christian faith speaks of three kinds of Jesus’ coming to us: his first coming at Christmas, his intermediate or middle coming through the journey of our earthly life, and his final coming at the end of time. “In his first coming our Lord came in the flesh and in our weakness; in his middle coming he comes in spirit and in power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and majesty” (St. Bernard).
As the first Sundays of Advent remind us, Jesus will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead – all of us. When will his final coming will take place? Nobody knows except our Father in heaven (Mt 24:36). Well, there are always some groups of Christians who keep telling us of Jesus’ immediate final coming. Someone asked Jesus: “Will few be saved?” Jesus answer to him and to us: “Keep on striving to enter through the narrow door” (Lk 13:22-24). What really matters for us is that we keep striving and try to be always prepared and ready to receive Jesus in his final coming at the end of time, and also at the end of our personal life here on earth.

There is between the coming of Christ at Christmas and his final coming at the end of the world, what St. Bernard calls “the middle coming,” which is also very important and the most frequent in our temporal life. Benedict XVI says that the middle coming takes place in a great variety of ways: “The Lord comes through his Word; he comes in the sacraments, especially in the most Holy Eucharist; he comes into my life through words or events.” He continues coming to us in a special manner in the poor and afflicted: “I was hungry and you gave me food… I was sick and you visited me” (Mt 25:35-36).
Through the liturgy of the four weeks of Advent, we Christians are reminded in particular of the coming of Christ at the end of time and, especially during the final weeks, of Jesus’ coming at Christmas. Our Lord Jesus Christ came the first time twenty one centuries ago in history, when He was born at Bethlehem, and He will come again this year in the liturgy of Christmas.
How do we prepare properly for the different comings of Christ into our lives? The Church invites us through Advent to acquire and deepen a hopeful attitude, which is really the attitude of life: we are pilgrims on the way to our God’s home. Christian hope is not “a pie in the sky,” but a commitment to change the present – our present. Rooted in the past, looking towards the future, Christian hope concentrates on the present, on the “now”: God, the object of our hope is “the eternal now” (Hebr 3:7-8). The only thing in our hands is not the past or the future but the present. To be truly hopeful a Christian – and other believers – tries earnestly to be faithful to the present moment: “I just keep concentrating on the present moment… An instant is a treasure. Let us see each instant as if there were no other” (St. Therese of the Child Jesus). What does it mean to live the present, this moment as if there were no other? It means to do what we have to do every moment, every “now” with love. We journey to the house of our Father with steps of love.
To be truly hopeful entails to be vigilant, that is, to be watchful: to see with the eyes of faith and love the realities of our life and our society, and try to transform ourselves and communities according to the values of the Gospel, including justice, solidarity and compassion. To be vigilant, to keep awake means to fight evil, sin, which is always a betrayal of God’s love. Sins of selfishness, pride, lust, insensibility to the needs of the poor are not steps forward or God-ward on our journey of life and of Advent, but steps backward. To be vigilant includes to be temperate by not allowing the body, or our passions, to lead us: “The body under the spirit and the spirit under God.” To be hopeful and vigilant, we are asked to be always motivated by love – of God, of neighbors, of the needy neighbors.
To prepare properly for the encounter with the Lord, we have to be prayerful: “To prepare the way means to pray well; it means thinking humbly of oneself” (St. Augustine). To be humbly prayerful means to ask the Lord constantly for his grace and graces for we are weak: “If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders toil” (Ps 127:1); “the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear?” (Ps 27:1). The Eucharist in particular is our especial nourishment for the pilgrimage.
Advent then is a time to prepare for the middle comings of Jesus, his final coming, and most proximately for Christmas. Indeed, the Lord is near!
May Isaiah, the prophet of Advent, Luke, the evangelist of the New Liturgical Year (2015-2016: C), and Mary, Our Lady of Hope accompany us on the journey of Advent!
Come, Lord Jesus, come!
(Published by O Clarim, Macau November 27, 2015)
FAUSTO GOMEZ, OP