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
“Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways, and harden our hearts, so that we do not fear you?” Isaiah asks in this Sunday’s First Reading.
Of course, God does not make us sin. However, he makes us capable of sinning: that is, capable of rejecting him, our creator, and going our own way.
In Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Aulë wants creatures who will love him, so he creates dwarves. However, because he is not God, his dwarves are mechanical creatures, unable to act except as he programs them. They cannot love him any more than they can reject him, for love, by its nature, must be willed freely.
Realizing his failure, Aulë raises a hammer to destroy the dwarves. However, at that moment, God intervenes to endow them with life, and they shrink away from the hammer, revealing that now they are sufficiently independent of Aulë to love or reject him.
Thus Tolkien, a convinced Catholic, portrayed God’s creation of humans. God formed them “out of the clay of the ground” and then “blew” into their nostrils “the breath of life,” so that they became living beings with free wills.
Moreover, he planned to divinize them, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church: to give them not only human life, but also his own divine, supernatural life.
Accordingly, he made them able to know him, love him, and serve him freely. However, that freedom meant that they could also choose to reject him.
Apparently, God thought that risk worth taking. “One could say that confronted with our human freedom, God decided to make himself impotent,” or powerless, said Pope St. John Paul II.
As we know, Adam and Eve did choose to reject God. They lost the possibility of supernatural life and, from then on, transmitted even human life in a fallen state. We, therefore, find it difficult to submit to God; repeatedly, we find ourselves doing not what we want to do, but what we hate, as St. Paul says.
“Why did you give us such freedom?” we might ask God. “Why do you not make us love you, force us to be good?” As Isaiah exclaims, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”
Poets have said the same. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” John Donne implored; “take me to You, imprison me.”
“Lord, hear my voice – my present voice, I mean, not that which may be speaking an hour hence,” C.S. Lewis prayed.
However, even though we ask it, God will not recall the freedom he has given us. He wants our love, freely willed.
God has given us everything we need to love him, even up to his own son, who became man to assume the consequences of our rejection and to offer us supernatural life once again. As St. Paul says, we are “not lacking in any spiritual gift” as we wait for the second coming of our Lord Jesus.
Just as our birth admitted us to human life, so baptism, our re-birth, admits us to supernatural life by making us members of Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church. That life is nourished by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We can lose it by mortal (“deadly”) sin, but, even then, it can be resurrected in the sacrament of penance.
Yes; God gives us everything we need to love him. All we have to do is make the necessary act of will. However, we have to make it repeatedly, just as a husband and wife, having promised love until death, must enact that promise for the rest of their lives.
The important thing is that when Christ comes, he will find us alive with supernatural life. He will come without warning, Jesus said, so we must keep awake, on the watch.
However, we need not be afraid. As St. Paul says, he will strengthen us to the end.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is Supernatural Life. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
Share your thoughts and contribute to the ongoing conversation by sending us a Letter to the Editor.
