Advent Week 1 Saturday

Readings: Isaiah 30:19-21, 23-26; Psalm 146; Matthew 9:35-10:1,6-8

The Lord builds up Jerusalem and brings back Israel's exiles, heals the broken-hearted and binds up all their wounds. So today's psalm. The first reading is very similar, speaking of healing and restoration, a new moment of security and plenty. We can imagine Jerusalem, like a city destroyed by warfare, and the Lord moving around in the streets of that city, finding the sick and needy, the starving and the abandoned.

One thing noted in the first reading that is not mentioned in the psalm is that it is the Lord who has inflicted on his people the suffering from which he is now rescuing them! He is, Isaiah says, their teacher, showing the way to the people, and he is their doctor, healing the bruises his blows have left.

It raises questions about the meaning of suffering and why evil things come on people. 'I must have done something really bad to have ended up like this', a sick cousin said to me one time. The proposal from Isaiah today is that we see a pedagogical purpose in suffering, it is not simply a punishment for sin. There are things we must learn, virtues to be acquired, ways of seeing to be corrected, realities to be appreciated. And it seems that often, perhaps always, it is only through suffering that human beings learn and acquire and correct and appreciate.

The gospel reading continues along this line but adds to it in significant ways. Here Jesus is moving around the towns and villages, doing what the first reading and the psalm speak about. He heals and he teaches, is moved with compassion, sees the devastated spiritual landscape in which the people are wandering, harassed and dejected.

One change from what we have seen already is that Jesus delegates the work of healing and teaching to the twelve disciples. They have been with him, being taught and healed themselves, and now they are ready to participate in the gathering of the harvest. He gives them extraordinary powers, to cure illness and cast out demons, to cleanse lepers and even raise the dead. the works which God does among the people are to be undertaken by the people themselves or at least by those called from among them to serve the Lord's work on their behalf.

Another significant change is that the Lord, the Messiah, will take on himself the sufferings of his people, entering into them in a way not seen before. It is more for Lent and Easter than for Advent and Christmas, this point about a new participation of the Lord in the sufferings of his people. It is something yet to be revealed about how the kingdom of heaven, that reign of healing and renewal, is finally established. But it is important to recall it already, as we gaze across the devastated landscape of the world in December 2024.

Today's opening prayer says that the Son comes to free the human race from its ancient enslavement, and to offer us true freedom. May we be ready to receive the gifts he brings, be ready to learn and suffer with him, be ready for the service of each other which he wishes to delegate to us.

Advent Week 1 Friday

Readings: Isaiah 29:17-24; Psalm 26; Matthew 9:27-31

Of course they talked about him all over the countryside. How could it be otherwise? I was blind and now I see: I have to share this extraordinary good news.

Enabling the blind to see is the work of the Messiah most frequently mentioned in the texts that look forward to his coming. The passage from Isaiah 29 which is the first reading today is one such text: the deaf will hear, the blind will see, on the day that is coming, in a very short time. Erring spirits will learn wisdom, it says, another kind of seeing, and murmurers will accept instruction, another kind of hearing.

The most puzzling line in the readings today is the stern warning from Jesus to the blind men now cured, 'take care that no one learns about this'. Various explanations are offered. It seems to contradict what Isaiah promises, that wisdom and instruction will also be offered on that day.

The saying of Jesus is a kind of koan, a religious riddle. Is he saying that broadcasting this about him will not help people to see him accurately? Is it that the political situation advises caution about his mission and identity? Is it that the time is not right for a fuller revelation of who he is? Is it part of the drama of the gospel, as in a novel or a play, to let his identity be revealed slowly?

The scholars offer these possibilities but nobody really knows. So we can take his warning with us and let in simmer in our minds, see what it produces as the day goes on. You and I have come to see when we were blind before. We have emerged from shadow and darkness. But tell no one. Why not? Is it that we must also learn about the light in which Jesus and his works are to be seen, not just any light (hey, I can see!), but the light of the resurrection (my Lord and my God!). And for that we must wait.

Hence the advice about not telling now - healing physical blindness is a sign, but it is not even half the story!

Advent Week 1 Thursday

Readings: Isaiah 26:1-6; Psalm 117; Matthew 7:21,24-27

Where yesterday we were invited to think about weakness and a compassionate Lord ensuring that the people's hunger would be satisfied, today we are presented with images of strength and resistance. Isaiah speaks of a strong city, with gates and walls, ramparts and towers, and a citadel brought down by an everlasting rock. It is an image of sanctuary and security for some, of destruction for others.

In the gospel reading Jesus explains that the basis of the distinction between a house that stands and a citadel that falls is the builder's relationship with the Word of God. Persons who not only listen but who act on the Word that Jesus teaches are building solidly and securely. They are doing the will of the Father and their house (that is, their soul) will withstand rain, floods, gales and whatever else life throws at it.

The person who listens, and perhaps even teaches others (saying 'Lord, Lord') but who does not in practice act on the teaching of Jesus is like a person building a house on sand: in the day of trouble it will not stand.

Isaiah says that the people who are faithful, steadfast, trusting and peaceful can enter the strong city: the gate opens for them. The ones who do not live in those ways, no matter if they listen and even if they repeat back what is required, are not building wisely. They may seem to be secure in their tower but will it stand?

So the message is simple and clear and there is no need to labour it. Advent is a kind of 'Lent lite' in which we are given time to return to the practice of God's Word. And what it asks us to do is equally clear: be faithful, be steadfast, be trusting, be peaceful. Then your house, your soul, will be like a strong city where you will live in security and in confidence. You will be a tower of strength, built not out of pride and ambition but constructed in the power of Christ's love, he who is the cornerstone of everything that endures.

Advent Week 1 Wednesday

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10; Psalm 22; Matthew 15:29-37

All three readings speak of the Lord feeding His people. The fish and bread of the miraculous feeding recounted in the gospel might seem a long way from the rich and juicy food and the fine strained wines of which Isaiah speaks in the first reading. Nor do fish and bread seem right as a menu for the banquet which we hear about in the psalm. Unless of course ...

Unless what? Well in Ireland we say that hunger is the best sauce. Food that in times of plenty will seem poor and unappetising, in times of shortage or great need will be received as very satisfactory, and even desirable. As long as it is wholesome it will certainly be welcomed by a hungry person. One Lent I spent some time in a monastery which was observing a strict fast. After three days the humble breakfast of bread and butter with coffee had become for me a banquet.

The gospel reading tells us that the people had been with Jesus for the same length of time, three days. They will therefore have worked up an appetite, carrying their sick relatives and friends to Jesus, hopeful but still anxious, perhaps having traveled long distances.

So what counts as a banquet depends also on the hunger of those who need to eat. And perhaps this is also a way of describing the work of Advent: we are given this time to work up an appetite for the One who is coming. The point is not just how glorious and splendid will be that coming. It will pass us by if we are not disposed to receive it, if we have no appetite for it, if we are satisfying the hunger of our souls on more immediate, fancier perhaps, but less wholesome food.

The Lord is coming to save us but what if we have no need for a Saviour? What if we already find salvation enough elsewhere? Fish and bread might seem like nothing compared with the juicy food and fine wines we get elsewhere. But if we are lame or crippled, blind or dumb, if we are hungry and needy, anxious and tired having travelled already so far - well then His coming will be wonderful and we will appreciate it. It will be enough to have Him with us. The fish and bread he offers will be glorious and fulfilling because we will recognise Him in these gifts, food from heaven, containing every pleasure, every delight, every blessing.

The Lord who is coming is full of compassion for struggling humanity: the gospel today also tells us this, from the lips of Jesus. May God give us a clear sense of our need, a keen awareness of our deepest hunger, so that we will rejoice and exult when that need is met and when that hunger is sated by the Lord for whom we are longing.

Advent Week 1 Tuesday

Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72; Luke 10:21-24

We have been having some very beautiful evenings the past week or so. There are few clouds and it gets dark early. There are lots of stars in the winter sky including that big one (Venus? the Christmas star?) just below the moon. On the footpaths the few remaining dead leaves glisten in the moonlight. Living here one is restricted to imagining the frost in lands further north, frost settling for another night.

Presiding over these quiet winter evenings is the moon. It contributes significantly to our peaceful nightscape although it cannot itself really be described as a peaceful place. This is because there is no life on the moon. Where there is no life there is no struggle, or anxiety, there is no need, or threat, or fear. If the moon is peaceful then it is the peace of the graveyard, the kind of peace found in dead places and not the full, rich, reconciled, healed, and justice-based peace that the Bible calls shalom.

The earth is not at all like the moon. Here there is life, many kinds of living things, and so there is much struggle, and anxiety, there is need, and threat, and fear. Where there is life there is the possibility of it being damaged, wounded, and even lost. Living things are aware of their surroundings and must keep watch and be attentive. Living things are always anxious or at least alert and they are always needy, for food, shelter, or a mate. Where there is life there is also threat and fear, even (perhaps especially) from other living things of the same kind.

Today's first reading paints a picture of paradise, the restoration of all things to an original peaceful cohabitation, the lamb entertaining the wolf, the calf and the young lion resting together, the children safe with no more hurt, no more harm. The great, groaning act of giving birth is over, and the creation settles into the shalom which comes with salvation.

But before that the earth, in particular the human world, is a place that needs justice, some kind of management and balancing of struggle and anxiety, of need and threat and fear. Inevitably, we contend with each other. We jostle with each other for food and influence. We are aware of each other as potential partners and friends and collaborators but also as different, as rivals, as perhaps not fully trustworthy, not really ‘on my side’.

The human world remains a place where we must strive for justice although justice often seems to be beyond us. Where people take action to restore or introduce justice they often end up doing some fresh injustice. Where one kind of exclusion, discrimination and inequality is removed, fresh kinds of exclusion, discrimination and inequality appear in their place.

Jesus lived in Palestine, the place where Europe, Africa and Asia meet. It was a key province of the Roman Empire, guarding the great trade routes to the East and to the South. For centuries it had been fought over by Egyptians and Assyrians and Persians and Greeks and Romans. Even today ‘Palestine’ presents the knottiest of human problems. It is the place where Jews, Christians and Muslims struggle to live together in justice and in peace. There are many other places where cultures, languages, races, and religions meet and where they must find out how to live together. But ‘Palestine’ is symbolic of them all, in particular of the difficulties they all face.

Jesus was born into this knot in the world’s history and geography. We believe him to be the Messiah promised in the scriptures, the one who has initiated God’s reign of shalom. The word means peace but not just in the sense of no fighting. It means a rich, reconciled, healed, justice-based peace, the peace that comes with the Messiah and is won, as it turns out, through His rejection, death and resurrection. ‘He himself will be peace’, the prophet Micah tells us. ‘In his days justice will flourish and peace till the moon fails’, says the great messianic Psalm 72, speaking about the kingdom of a future son of the House of David. Through him the earth has been filled with the knowledge of the Lord.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote the first book to be called Politics and in it he says that human community and civilization are built on communication. It is by talking and listening that we recognize and establish justice. Thomas Aquinas liked the idea: ‘communication builds the city’, he says, commenting on Aristotle’s text. It is part of human greatness that we understand the need for justice and can work together to try to build it. And we build it through listening and talking.

The Word became flesh in Palestine in the first century. Into the knot of human struggle and anxiety, of need and threat and fear, God entered to speak His Word. Jesus is God’s contribution to the human conversation about justice and peace. We will find peace, he says, only by loving our enemies. People laughed at this, of course, but he has shown us that it is the only way: you must love one another as I have loved you. We celebrate his birth because he is our hope. He is the light shining in this world’s darkness. With the birth of this Child the time has arrived in which justice has begun to flourish and his peace grows till the moon fails.

Advent Week 1 - Monday

Readings: Isaiah 4;2-6 Psalm 122; Matthew 8:5-11

Today's psalm is one of the psalms 'of ascent', songs sung by the people as they made their way in pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They are among the most beautiful and joyful of the psalms. In them the people look forward to their first sight of the holy city, to their arrival within its walls, and above all to the moment when they enter beneath the roof of the Temple to be as close to the glory of God's presence as it was possible for most human beings to be. Only the King and the High Priest could go closer, into the Holy of Holies itself, and then only on rare occasions.

These psalms evoke a settled time in the history of God's people. They are resident in the land, doing their work and rearing their families, seeking to be faithful to the covenant and to receive the blessings promised for that faithfulness. Part of that faithfulness was their worship in the Temple, on the appointed days, for the appointed feasts. It was after all 'the house of the Lord for the tribes of Israel' - both parts of that statement to undergo radical revision as the story unfolds.

The first reading is a passage from the early chapters of Isaiah which take us to a particular historical moment. Jerusalem, Judah, Israel - all are under threat from foreign armies and already it seems that there have been significant losses. But the Lord says, through his prophet, that a remnant will remain in the city. It feels like an effort to 'patch things up' or at least save something. Things are slipping away, falling apart, but for now the Lord will confirm the presence of his glory in the city, a cloud by day and a fire by night just as in the years of desert wandering. For now the Lord's glory will continue to provide shelter and protection.

Later came exile and the radical challenges it presented to the people's self-understanding and to their understanding of God. The loss of everything - land, city, temple - meant thinking out again from the beginning how they understood their own call, how they understood the Lord their God whose glory had then departed from the Temple, how they understood what God had to do with all the other people there are in the world and what all those other people might have to do with the Lord, the God of Israel.

The Advent season invites us to think about where we might be in relation to such historical experiences of God's people. Are we settled and secure, peaceful in our worship of God and in our understanding of our relationship with him? Are we under pressure, feeling that things are slipping away but that a moment of 'searing judgement', as Isaiah puts it, a re-affirmation of God's call, might just be enough to get us back on track, certainly if it comes with a new manifestation of God's glory present among us? Or are we in exile, having lost the securities which up to now had confirmed for us the call of God, His favour towards us, His presence with us, our special place in His plan?

Perhaps we need to prepare ourselves for a new moment in the history of God's people, a new chapter in the history of the Church? The coming of Jesus was just such a moment. Instead of people seeking the Lord in Jerusalem we see the Lord seeking the people wherever they are. 'I will come and cure him' is Jesus' immediate response to the centurion who asks his help. Instead of preparing himself to enter under God's roof, the Lord offers to come under the roof of the centurion, to come to where he is, to dwell with him. 'Only say the word', the centurion says to Jesus.

Jesus is that Word, the only Word, spoken by the Father into the world and its history. All other messages and revelations are echoes, before or after, of this one Word. We are getting prepared once again to celebrate the birth of this Word. Looking at our world, at the Church, and at our own lives, we might well be tempted to say 'Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof'.

The centurion is a foreigner, not a believer by the criteria of Israel's religion and yet nowhere in Israel has Jesus encountered such faith. Once again our understanding is to be blown open (this is the searing judgement spoken of by Isaiah). We need to think it all out once again, to seek a fresh understanding of God and of God's presence to human beings, to understand in a new way the meaning of the call we have received as 'members of Christ', to think again about what God has to do with all the other people there are in the world and what all those other people have to do with Him.

Our minds are focusing on Bethlehem, the house of bread, a temple for all peoples, God pitching His tent among us. This new thing God wants to do - speaking His Word once more into our world and into our history, into our time and place - will be, as always, particularly directed to places, communities and individuals who are 'paralysed and suffering greatly'. We find hope and courage in the response of Jesus to the centurion, 'I will come and cure him'. 'Come Lord, cure us.'

Advent Week 1 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

We have tested and tasted too much, lover – 
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

These are the opening lines of a poem called Advent, written by Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) and learned by every Irish schoolboy and girl of my generation. The adult who is experienced, compromised and perhaps a bit cynical envies the wonder and amazement that characterise the child’s soul. So the poet speaks of ‘the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children’. He hopes that ‘the dry black bread and the sugarless tea of penance will charm back the luxury of a child’s soul’. 

As children we have a strong and natural sense of wonder. Part of the price of growing up seems to be the loss of the freshness and clarity that goes with it. The world becomes ordinary. It becomes less magical and more serious. It becomes indifferent and perhaps even hostile. Something is lost, a sharpness, an edge, a light, in which even the most ordinary things are magical and the most ordinary events mysterious. We find it briefly again, perhaps, by going to see Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings but the point is whether it can be found again in our real lives and not just in the flickering images.

What about a bridge, a boat, a river bank, a field, a red bus (now there’s a wonder!), early morning sun on a distant sea, unused tram tracks, tar bubbling on a summer’s day, the buzz of insects, the Christmas lights – and many other ordinary things and what they meant to the child you once were.

Grown-ups still ‘get’ something of wonder at second hand, through their children. The excitement and amazement of children, especially at Christmas time, is contagious. Through their eyes we glimpse again what we once knew – the excited waiting of the Advent season, the longing, almost beyond bearing, for a great day ahead.

The season of Advent invites us to return and rediscover something we have lost. This is what the word ‘repent’ means – turn back, turn around, return. We are to do this not just to lament what has been lost but to re-discover a sense of excitement, to be alert and keen and awake and attentive once more. We are to be open to the wonders that the Lord will yet reveal in our lives (tired and cynical as we may be at times), the wonders he will yet reveal in our world (unjust, violent and corrupt as it often now is).

We have tested and tasted too much. The cares and worries and sad events of life overpower us. Distractions keep us from settling deeply into our own hearts. It may be that the hardening and darkening that follow sin have overtaken us. Whatever the state of our adult heart, Advent holds out the promise of again living in a wonder-full way.

This note of joyful expectation and keen wonder is sounded throughout the liturgy of the Advent season. Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, rejoicing as we approach his house. Swords will be turned into ploughshares, spears into sickles. There will be no more training for war. Wake up because it will soon be daylight and the time of dreary darkness will be over. Stay awake! Stand ready! Be alert and keen and expectant because the coming of the Son of Man will be sudden and full of significance.

Often people say that Christmas is for children. It is more true to say that Christmas is for adults who have not forgotten what it means to be a child. It is for those who have suffered ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and have not allowed it to destroy their wonder or joy or hope. Christmas is a time to rekindle our faith that our God will return, paving a way through the valleys and mountains of our lives, making possible what seemed impossible. He is, after all, the God who raises the dead.

The child in us has no difficulty believing such wonders and all we need do is trust that that child is seeing something true. We are to be the adult children of our Heavenly Father, charming back the luxury of the child’s soul through prayer and reconciliation, penance and right living. It is not really a luxury, this child’s soul in us. It is essential for our maturity since unless we become as little children, we shall not be ready to enter the kingdom of heaven when He comes.

This reflection was first published in the parish newsletter of St Dominic's, London