Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

The Holy Father, Pope Francis, wrote that today, people need to witness God’s mercy and tenderness, which spurs the resigned, enlivens the distant-hearted, and ignites the fire of hope. He ignites the fire of hope! We don’t. So many situations require our comforting witness. To be joyful, comforting people. I’m thinking of those who are burdened by suffering, injustice, and tyranny, of those who are slaves to money, power, success, and worldliness. Poor dears! They have fabricated consolation, not the true comfort of the Lord! We are all called to comfort our brothers and sisters, to testify that God alone can eliminate the causes of existential and spiritual tragedies. He can do it! He is powerful! Isaiah’s message, which resounds on this second Sunday of Advent, is a salve on our wounds and an impetus to prepare with commitment to the way of the Lord. Indeed, today, the prophet speaks to the heart to tell us that God condones our sins and comforts us. If we entrust ourselves to him with a humble and penitent heart, He will tear down the walls of evil; He will fill in the holes of our omissions, will smooth over the bumps of arrogance and vanity, and will open the way of an encounter with Him. It is curious, but we are often afraid of consolation, of being comforted. Or rather, we feel more secure in sorrow and desolation. Do you know why? Because in sorrow, we feel almost like the protagonist. However, in consolation, the Holy Spirit is the protagonist! It is He who consoles us, and it is He who gives us the courage to go out of ourselves. It is He who opens the door to the source of every true comfort, that is, the Father. And this is conversion.

What an amazing thought:  even Jesus had to evangelize!   Why didn’t he supernaturally infuse the knowledge of God into everyone’s mind?   As divine Creator, he easily could have compelled people to believe.   They would have known instantaneously that he was God and that he could redeem them from their sins. But it wasn’t Jesus’ goal simply to pass out information.   And it wasn’t his goal to overwhelm his people with works of power.  He wanted a relationship with them.   He wanted them to love him for who he was and not for what he said or for what he could give them.  That’s why he chose ordinary human ways to reach out to them.  As Matthew tells us, Jesus visited “all the towns and villages.”   He walked the dusty roads.  He went into the synagogues, one at a time.   He talked to the villagers and got to know their stories.  And he healed them. That’s a great example to follow.   We might think we need a complex plan to bring the good news to our friends or family members or even strangers.  Or we might wish God would infuse them with knowledge of the gospel.   But Jesus shows us the right place to start: through relationships. How?   Make yourself present to people, as Jesus did.   Listen to them.   Show them some kindness.   So many people just want to be heard; they just want someone to treat them with a little kindness.   As you start doing that, you will see trusting relationships beginning to form. It’s in the context of a relationship that you are able to speak honestly about who God is in your life.   It’s when a friend asks, “Why do you even go to church?” that you can share how the Eucharist gives you strength.   It’s when he comments on the Bible you keep in your car that you can talk about how you hear God speaking to you through Scripture. Relationships.   That’s where it all starts.   But it doesn’t end there.   With every friendship you make and every encounter you have, you can be sowing seeds that lead someone closer to the Lord. – Fr. Maurice Nutt

Our readings today speak of blindness. From Isaiah, we read that “out of the gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see.” Matthew’s Gospel echoes a similar theme as Jesus asks two blind men who seek sight, “Do you believe that I can do this?” In affirmation, he then tells them, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser speaks to the two meanings of blindness, which we can view most clearly when Jesus heals people.  “He’s giving them more than just physical sight; he’s opening their eyes so that they can see more deeply. Seeing, truly seeing, implies more than having eyes that are physically healthy and open. We all see the outer surface of things, but what’s beneath isn’t as automatically seen. G.K. Chesterton notes that ‘familiarity is the greatest of all illusions and that the secret to life is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again.’ We open our eyes to depth when we open ourselves to wonder.” Fr. Henri Nouwen writes that the power of wonderment is exampled in the eyes of a child. “The minds of children marvel at all they see. It’s a mind not filled with worries for tomorrow but alert and awake in the present moment. It’s a mind opened for grace.” That is what true spiritual sight is about. Bishop Robert Barron echoes the need for openness to God’s grace working in our lives. “If you have not surrendered to the grace of God, you are blind. How wonderful it is, then, that these men in the Gospel can cry out to Jesus in their need . . . You can have all the wealth, pleasure, honor, and power you want. You can have all the worldly goods you could desire. But if you don’t see spiritually, it will do you no good; it will probably destroy you.”

As we cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come,” the opening verse from the Gospel of Matthew should hopefully affirm our daily effort to put Christ’s teaching into practice, especially in times of personal difficulties or in times like today with the upheavals we are witnessing in Church. How do we stay firm in the faith in these challenging times? Fr. Richard Rohr looks at how we embrace the kingdom of God. “I suspect what Jesus means by “Lord, Lord” is how we try to make the kingdom of God into our own ideal of that kingdom. If we make heaven into the kingdom, we miss most of its transformative message. We are not waiting for the coming of the ideal church or any perfect world here and now . . . the kingdom is more than all of these. It is always here and not here. It is always now and not yet . . . The kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of self and society or personal reward.” Bishop Robert Barron asks what our foundation is built upon. “On what precisely is the whole of your life built? Your heart or soul is the center of you, the place where you are most authentically and deeply yourself. That is your point of contact with God. There, you will find the energy that undergirds and informs all the other areas of your life: physical, psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual. As such, it is the most important and most elusive dimension of who you are.”

These words from Isaiah bring us into the language of the feast, a celebration that the Lord has prepared for his people. This is also a prefigurement of the eucharistic banquet that was instituted by Jesus. His meal is divine nourishment as he provides his own Body and Blood to strengthen our soul. Saint Pope John Paul II said, “To share in the Lord’s Supper is to anticipate the heavenly feast of the marriage of the Lamb. Celebrating this memorial of Christ, risen and ascended into heaven, the Christian community waits in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” It is our pledge of future glory.

The Second Coming of Christ that history waits for is not the same as the baby Jesus or even the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was one man, and Christ is not his last name. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that Christ includes the whole sweep of creation and history joined with him—and you, too. We very rightly believe in “Jesus Christ,” and both words are essential. The celebration of Christmas is not a sentimental waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born! We do the Gospel no favor when we make Jesus, the Eternal Christ, into a perpetual baby, a baby able to ask little or no adult response from us. God clearly wants friends, partners, and images if we are to believe the biblical texts. He wants adult religion and a mature, free response from us. God loves us as adult partners, with mutual give and take, and you eventually become the God that you love. I understand where such devotions to the Infant child Jesus come from, but these do not come close to the power of the biblical proclamation that invites us into adult cooperation, free participation, and the love of free and mature persons in God. The Christ we are asking for and waiting for includes your own full birth and the further birth of history and creation. Now you can say, “Come, Christ Jesus,” with a whole new understanding and a deliberate passion!

The American Declaration of Independence says we have an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Fr. Richard Rohr writes that God created us to be happy and joyful in this world and the next, and Jesus says the same several times in the Gospel of John. The only difference between the two is that any happiness that is demanded from life never becomes happiness because it is too narcissistically and self-consciously pursued. The “joy that the world cannot give” always comes as a gift to those who wait for it, expect it, and make room for it inside themselves. The first is self-assertion, the second is self-surrender. The first is taking; the second is receiving. Those are two entirely different human dynamics. You do not catch a butterfly by chasing it: you sit still, and it alights on your shoulder. Then it chooses you. That is true happiness. When we set out to seek our private happiness, we often create an idol that is sure to topple. Any attempts to protect any full and private happiness amid so much public suffering must be based on an illusion about the nature of our world. We can only do that if we block ourselves from a certain degree of reality and refuse solidarity with “the other side” of everything, even the other side of ourselves. Both sides of life are good and necessary teachers; in fact, failure and mistakes teach us much more than our successes. Failure and success were often called “the two hands of God.” It takes struggle with both our darkness and our light to form us into full children of God, but of course, we especially resist “the left hand of God,” which is usually some form of suffering or loss of control. As in our Gospel reading today, the same suffering of the centurion’s servant brought the centurion out of his comfortable house and invited Jesus into that house! Suffering and solidarity with the suffering of others have an immense capacity to “make room” inside of us. It is probably our primary spiritual teacher.

Fr. Brian Maher, OMI, asks, “Do we wonder why this reading, which comes at the end of Luke’s Gospel, has been chosen to lead us into Advent and the start of another Church year?” If we see it as promising the coming of a God who will judge and punish us, it would be a very ill-chosen reading. If we see it as promising the coming of a God of destruction, a distant, impersonal God to be feared and avoided, if possible, then using it to begin a ‘new’ year would be encouraging people to leave the Church rather than to “return with all your heart.” But if we read this Gospel as the first Christian communities read it, then we truly can “…Stand erect and raise your heads” because the tiny child who will be born into our world in just four weeks is indeed ‘our God,’ coming in love, to reveal to us a God of love and to say to us, “I do not call you servants but friends…”; I wash your feet because you are ‘created in my image and likeness,’ and underneath the dirt and grime of everyday living there is a person of unique dignity; my son, my daughter, my friend and an heir to God’s Kingdom. What a wonderful Gospel with which to begin Advent.

Throughout its 2000-year history, Christian theology has never backed away from the truth and exclusivity of the claim that Christ is the (only) way, truth, and life and that nobody can come to God except through him. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “How can we view the truth of other religions in the light of Christ’s claim that he is the only way to the Father?” He writes that Christian theology (certainly Roman Catholic theology) has always accepted and proactively taught that the Mystery of Christ is much larger than what can be observed in the visible, historical enfolding of Christianity and the Christian churches in history. Christ is larger than our churches and operates too outside of our churches. He is still telling the church what Jesus once told his mother: “I must be about my Father’s business.” This may come as a surprise to some. Still, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. This is predicated on understanding the God we worship as Christians. The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. There is, in the end, only one God, and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion.

The day after Thanksgiving, looking out our window, we see the tree branches bare and anticipate the smell of snow in the air. Jesus speaks a parable to his disciples about the fig tree and the coming of the Kingdom of God. He points out that signs will be given and tells them that these will indicate the time is near. Evelyn Underhill writes that Christ never seems to be delivering pure truth at first, yet in the end, he feeds the souls of the learned and the simple. He seems so often content to prepare souls by one great revealing truth and then leave grace to act, fertilize, bring forth, and give light to the mystery. As Christians, we are called to be beacons of hope. We will very shortly enter into the season of Advent, the season of hope in the birth of the Messiah. Our lives get busier as we prepare for Christmas. In our scurrying around, let us pray that we do not get too busy to look around and meet our brothers and sisters’ needs who could require our help. The reality is that they were not planned; life’s interruptions usually come at the most inopportune time. But Henri Nouwen famously said: “As Christians, the interruptions ARE our work.” As we prepare for the coming of the King, what will others see when they look at us? Let us pray that we are open to recognizing and reacting to the interruptions Christ sends us. May we leave those needing help with the hope of trees budding and summer being just around the corner.