First Sunday B of Advent Lk 21,25-28,34-36

Introduction.

We are beginning a new church or liturgical year. We Christians do not have a unique counting of the years like the Jews, and we do not have a fantastic beginning like the Chinese, Buddhists, Muslims… For us, the first Sunday of Advent is not a variant of the new civil year. Because ordinary years count, they go one after the other and are never the same; there is only one of each year in history, so church years do not matter; they are always the same because they are a repetition of the cycle of feasts. That is why it is better to use the name liturgical year and not the ecclesiastical year. During the liturgical year, we remember the same mysteries of our salvation.

Sermon

Thus, today, on the First Sunday of Advent, we begin to remember the coming of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, into the world. In doing so, we recognize the historic Advent when the prophets of the Old Testament prepared the nation for the coming of the Messiah. Their predictions have come true. God came into the world in Bethlehem when He was born as a bit of child of the Virgin Mary. We are also beginning to experience a liturgical Advent. During the four weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord, we will read from the Holy Scriptures, not only in churches but also at home in private devotions such as the Advent Wreath, about the events that preceded the coming of the Lord Jesus into the world. These are especially prophecies. The liturgical hymns are also a wonderful experience of this short season of Advent, both in their content and melody. During these days, we also remember more of our life’s Advent. None of us knows the day, the hour, or the place where our death will find us. Our whole life, then, is a preparation – an Advent for meeting God the Judge.

Advent is thus a time of new graces when we become more realistically aware of a kind of beginning and an end.
We also find this idea in today’s Gospel of St. Luke, from which we will read passage after passage throughout the liturgical year, except on certain feasts and Sundays. Today’s course begins with the words: Jesus said to his disciples: “There will be signs…” (Lk 21:25).

St. Luke unconventionally presents the awaited Messiah as the Judge of the world at the end of time. It is a remembrance that the One foretold by the prophets is the same One whose coming humanity awaits at the end of time. Advent tells us that God is sending his Son, the eternal Word, into the world (cf. Heb. 1:2), and it is up to the people whether they want to hear God the Word. This Word, Jesus Christ, was born as a sign “for the fall and for the rising up of many… and for a sign to be contradicted” (Luke 2:34), “for the Word of God is living, effectual and sharper than any two-edged sword; piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul from spirit, and of the joints from the points, and judging the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). The Word made flesh brings a state of crisis upon the world, it divides; the Word comes to redeem the world, but whoever despises and does not receive Him “shall be judged in the last day” (Jn 12:48). The time between the birth of Christ and the coming of Christ, the Judge, is given to all to consciously and freely express by their lives their relationship to Christ. The response to the words “follow me” (Mt. 19:21) will be the reward or the punishment. It is characteristic that when the wise men from the East first inquired about the born Messiah of whom the prophets wrote, “King Herod was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him” (Mt. 2:3), and on the third day after God’s birth, we have to remember the slaughter of the boys of Bethlehem. These and other facts say what Jesus predicted: “Do not think that I have brought peace on earth. It is not peace I have brought, but a sword.” (Mt. 10:34). At the beginning of Advent, therefore, we also commemorate the second coming of Christ, who will then be seen coming in a cloud with power and great glory (cf. Lk 21:27). And this requires us to be careful that that day does not take us by surprise. It is an exhortation for the whole liturgical year: “Watch therefore all the time and pray that you may escape all that is to come and stand before the Son of Man” (Lk 21:36).

With terrible words, the Lord Jesus predicts the end of the world. The end of two worlds. First, the end of the local, particular world, such as Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Temple, which was worse than the end of the world for the Jews in 70 AD. And finally, the end of all this wonderful thing we call Earth. The vision of its future already finds empirical justification in the potential forever worse inventions and a diminishing sense of responsibility. But that’s only someday, someday. But already today, we are each experiencing our end of the world in different spheres of our lives. There was a time when a young, healthy, non-disabled person had it all, and gradually he lost one thing after another until finally, he had nothing left. The end of our world is a gradual process; that is the actual reality that we experience day by day. And it is precisely at the beginning of Advent that we are concerned to live responsibly before God, without hysteria and any gallows determination. When Advent reminds us of the end of the world, we also understand it as our death. Everything that lives must die; only artificial flowers do not die.

Advent is also the school of knowing how to die properly. We are preparing for the feast of the Nativity of the Lord Jesus, and it is a souvenir to remind ourselves more of the need to prepare for our death and make the most of our lives. That is why Advent is also timely in that we enrich our spiritual life with the values of inner culture and, above all, with the virtues. The new liturgical year is an opportunity for us to use each day to enrich our lives.
When two men learned of the death of their friend, they had this conversation. One asked the other: “How much and what did he leave behind?” To this, the other replied: “Everything!”

We shouldn’t act like the king in a fairy tale. He dressed in beautiful clothes and displayed himself for admiration. He was coming out of his palace when the sun was shining in his face. Then the gold of his dress reflected off his clothes, and his subjects could admire him. This filled him with joy. Once, he made the mistake of going out early. The sun shone from his back, and he saw his shadow for the first time. The black shadow and not the glint of gold had provoked anger in him. Annoyed, he mounted his horse, rode forward, but he could not outrun his shadow. He was stupid. And the tale goes that even today, he still runs in anger after his shadow.
Don’t we also run after our shadow? We should learn to live with our shadow – death. It is a reality that we fear, but we do not despair. Why do we not despair? We have trusted in Christ and are cooperating with him. Let us recall a severe thought.

The story tells of a poor man who suffered because of his poverty. But he kept praying, “Lord, please let me win the lottery for once.” He was getting worse and worse, winning nothing, but he kept praying, “Lord, please let me win the lottery just once.” Until one night, he wakes up to the voice of the Lord God saying to him: “So help me too and buy at least one lottery ticket at last.”
We should take Advent as a time of grace and cooperate with God. Perhaps that is the only reason we did not accomplish what we set out to do in the past liturgical year, that we did not just talk, or make plans, or build castles in the air, or dream rosy dreams, or roll up our sleeves, or honestly put ourselves into difficulties, into overcoming obstacles, and so we did not make progress. Let us say to ourselves: enough!

I remember the words of a friend, a young priest, a few weeks before he died. He had no idea that the Lord would call him so quickly. Then he said: “It is important that the hour of death should find us morally alert. That our conscience may be operative and worthy to direct our action towards God in this fateful hour. When we see around us blasphemy, desecration of Sundays, disrespect for man, lack of concern for the Christian education of children, immorality and disruption of families, lies and other injustices, does it trouble us? Let us live differently. Let us awaken our conscience and the conscience of those around us. Let us repent for ourselves and for them.”
Christmas is at the door. Even death is upon us, and death, a phenomenon that demands and deserves our attention.

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