The readings for the First Sunday of Advent, Year C can be found here.
December 1st, this first day of the month, is also the first day of our Catholic liturgical year. We begin each liturgical year with the season of Advent. Marked by the color purple at our liturgies, Advent is a season of preparation and penance, coming before the great extended feasts of the Nativity and Epiphany.
And yet, rather than noting a dramatic break with last week’s (and last liturgical year’s) readings for Christ the King, we might notice a continuation. Advent begins with more of the same – an apocalyptic sense of the world coming to an end. Is there irony in this? Or is it fitting for us to begin our liturgical year with attention to our ultimate destination? After all, when we begin something new, we do it with a sense of the goal that lies ahead, and the liturgical year is always preparing us for the end.
Advent thus prepares us not only for our celebration of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, but also for Jesus’s final coming at the end of time. The overlap is “Jesus coming,” and the etymology of Advent is in fact “coming” or “arrival.” Our first reading from Jeremiah echoes this theme of Christ’s arrival: “The days are coming” (33:14). Of course, when we think of Christmas coming, there is so much involved: menu planning, attending parties, school concerts, choosing and wrapping gifts, decorating, etc. The preparation for the end of time has no such furnishings, and in fact, it may remind us that these are the passing things of earth.
While the trimmings of Christmas are completely fitting for celebrating Christ’s Incarnation, Nativity, and presence among his people on earth, the spiritual preparation of meditating on end times is also tantamount to this feast. We are asked to “prepare our hearts” for Jesus’s coming – both at Christmas and at the end of time.
In today’s readings, heart is mentioned twice. In our second reading we hear:
May the Lord make you increase and abound in love
1 Thessalonians 3:12-13
for one another and for all,
just as we have for you,
so as to strengthen your hearts,
to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father
at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones. Amen.
The gospel of Luke finds Jesus exhorting us to vigilance in our lives:
“Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
Luke 21:34-36
from carousing and drunkenness
and the anxieties of daily life,
and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.
For that day will assault everyone
who lives on the face of the earth.”
These images, of strengthening our hearts and not allowing hearts to become drowsy accord well with Pope Francis’s latest encyclical, Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart. Jesus’s heart is strong and alert, inflamed with love even as it is wounded by a crown of thorns. The preparation of Advent is one that acknowledges and fights against our own weakened and drowsy hearts, not by acts of supreme willpower, but first and foremost with the acknowledgement of how much we need Jesus. We could not save ourselves; Jesus came to us as a baby. We cannot make everything come out right in the end; Jesus will come to us.
Our preparation reminds us of our humility and brokenness, which awakens in us the desire for God’s grace that he gives so abundantly by various means – most especially in the Eucharist, but also in the forgiveness we receive in the Sacrament of Confession, as well as in many other ways. Pope Francis mentioned suffering, compunction, reparation, and forgiveness in his encyclical. All of these are given us by God to keep our hearts alert and strengthened; we must embrace rather than ignore them as we spend these next 24 days readying our hearts for Christ’s coming.
