1st Sunday of Advent, Year B
First Reading: Is 63:16b-17, 19; 64:1, 3-8
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:3-9
Gospel Reading: Mk 13:31-37

This Sunday, the first of the new liturgical year, the Church recapitulates salvation history. We have heard it before, but we need to be reminded of it.

God made us. As Isaiah says, we are the clay, and he is the potter. Nevertheless, we have all become unclean. Why did God let us stray from him and harden our hearts against him?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church asks the same question: “If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist?”

“God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil,” the Catechism stresses. “He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it.” In fact, he “would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.”

The good that emerged from our original sin was the Incarnation. “For us men and for our salvation,” God became man. “O happy fault,” the Church says, “O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”

God could have created a world “so perfect that no evil could exist in it,” the Catechism says. However, he “freely willed to create a world in a state of journeying toward its ultimate perfection.” In particular, humans, as “intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love.” Accordingly, they can go astray, and “indeed, they have sinned.”

God created Adam and Eve “in his image and likeness,” giving them the power to perfect that likeness, just as an acorn has the power to grow into a perfect oak tree. However, they attempted the impossible: to be godlike apart from God. As a result, the development of their perfection was arrested. It was as though a grub had eaten into the acorn; it could still germinate and grow a little, but it could never be more than a poor, stunted thing, a mere parody of what God had designed it to become.

With their natures unfallen, Adam and Eve had freely chosen to reject God. Now, with their natures fallen, they could not attain what God had planned for them.

However, God did not abandon us. He became one of us and, for us, did what had to be done to restore our original nature. Now all we have to do is graft ourselves on to him like a branch on to a vine: by belief, by baptism, by eating his body and blood, and by eliminating from our lives anything that conflicts with the Christ-life within us.

Now we can attain the perfection God planned for us. As St. Paul says, we “are not lacking in any spiritual gift” as we wait “for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” and the definitive establishment of his kingdom.

That time has not yet come, Christ says in the Gospel. The present time is “a time still marked by distress and the trial of evil,” says the Catechism. “It is a time of waiting and watching.”

“Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come,” Christ warns. “Keep awake … or else he may find you asleep.”

In the meantime, we must not be fooled by other promises. God’s kingdom will be fulfilled “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil,” the Catechism says. That will occur at “the Last Judgment, after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.”

This belief does not make us escapists. On the contrary, we who centre our thoughts on eternity instead of our short life in this world are the only true realists.