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
Happy New Year! We are starting Advent, the first season of the Church’s liturgical year. Today is as noteworthy as Jan. 1, when we start the new calendar year.
“In Christianity, time has a fundamental importance,” Pope St. John Paul II said. “Within the dimension of time the world was created; within it the history of salvation unfolds, finding its culmination in the ‘fullness of time’ of the Incarnation.”
At the Easter Vigil, the Pope noted, the priest inscribes the paschal candle with the numerals of the current year, for “Christ is the Lord of time,” its beginning and its end.
The Church lives and celebrates the liturgy in the span of a year, the Pope said. “The solar year is thus permeated by the liturgical year, which in a certain way reproduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption, beginning on the first Sunday of Advent and ending on the solemnity of Christ the King, Lord of the universe and Lord of history.”
Time is the mode in which God allows us to experience reality in this life, moment by moment. However, even now there are indications that we will eventually see reality whole and entire. For example, time often surprises us: how much or how little has passed, how slowly or how quickly it goes. We need God’s help to keep us “steady and without blame” while we wait “for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed,” as St. Paul says. If time were our natural environment, we would not notice it; it would carry us along as the current in a river carries a log.
What we call our “lifetime” is the time God gives us to fit ourselves for Heaven or for Hell. How well are we using this time?
“In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is Himself eternal” (that is, outside time), the Pope said. This relationship of God with time gives us the duty to “sanctify time,” or make it holy.
Especially, we are commanded to keep Sunday holy, even if we cannot get to Mass. How obedient are we?
This commandment, the third, appears in the Bible three times. The first shows that Sunday is meant to recall our creation; the second, our covenant with God; and the third, our re-creation through his Son.
The “new creation” began when Christ rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. Accordingly, the early Christians made Sunday a festival, rejoicing in Christ as the “first-born of all creatures” and “the first-born of the dead.”
Mass is the heart of Sunday, but we must live all of it – family life, social life, relaxation – so that “the peace and joy of the risen Lord emerge,” the Pope said. For example, families can eat together, listen to one another, share their faith, and pray together.
To celebrate Sunday fully, we must rediscover Christian joy: the joy of the apostles and the women at the Resurrection, the joy to which Christ will welcome us at our death. In a sense, it is a virtue, and so it must be nurtured. Think of the effort we put into evoking joy at Christmas and on birthdays!
“If you call the Sabbath a delight, and the Lord’s holy day honourable,” God said; “if you honour it by not following your ways, seeking your own interests, or speaking with malice, then you shall delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth.”
The beginning of a new year is a special time for resolutions. Let us resolve to live this year in the spirit of the Church’s liturgy.
Let us begin with Advent, in which we “wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed,” as St. Paul says. That means using Advent to prepare for Christ’s coming and waiting until Christmas to celebrate.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge. All the materials (video and print) are available online at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 13, “God: Unity and Trinity,” will be available Nov. 29.