Homily for the First Sunday of Advent (B)

As is already quite obvious to all of you, in beginning this new Liturgical Year we have also begun using our new translation of the Roman Missal.  While not exactly revolutionary, it can fairly be described as the most significant change in the Liturgy in the past forty years.

The new translation of the Missal has attracted a bit of attention from the media, and we’ve certainly spent a fair amount of time planning and preparing for these changes, and for good reason. While the central realities of the Mystery have not changed, and the meaning hasn’t been altered, the language we use to communicate these realities has changed.  We will have to re-learn the language we use to address Almighty God in the Liturgy.

In a sense, this re-learning we will undertake together reflects the great challenge that is inherent in all prayer: our bumbling human attempt to adequately express the inexpressible; to put into words our deepest gratitude, our worship, and our praise; to put into words our deepest, most personal fears, hopes, and aspirations.

In our Responsorial Psalm today, we hear the Psalmist’s attempt to put these hopes and desires, this longing into his own words of prayer.  With the Psalmist we prayed: “Lord make us turn to you, let us see your face…” 

And similarly, in our first reading the prophet Isaiah gives voice to these longings in a mournful demand that God “rend the heavens and come down.”  In everyday language, Isaiah’s lament is the biblical version of our occasional questions and doubts: “God, where are you?  Why am I going through this? Why have you allowed these terrible things to happen?”

For some, giving voice to this kind of doubt and frustration is scandalous: “Who are we to question God like that?”  But if we do not turn to God when we feel burdened, oppressed, and hopeless, then to whom can we turn?

Only true believers can “lament the apparent absence of God in the workings of this world.”  Only the faithful can truly mourn for those who are afflicted and demand to know how long they will have to endure.

Today’s readings and indeed the entire season of Advent, which we begin today, invite us to acknowledge and lament the sin, the suffering, and the difficulties we often face in the here and now.  That’s why Advent has a somewhat subdued and somber tone… we wear mournful purple, we sing no Gloria, we confess our sins and do penance.  Advent faces the harsh realities of the truth with honesty and doesn’t allow us to ignore them through a blinding naiveté.  Advent puts us in touch with, and gives us a language with which we can express, our deepest longings and desires.

But neither does Advent allow us to become mired in hopelessness or despair.  At the end of his lament in our first reading, Isaiah turns in faithful prayer to God and uses a beautiful metaphor.  He says: “Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay and you are the potter – we are all the work of your hands.”

Brothers and sisters, Advent reminds us that despite the truth of our sinfulness, our suffering, and our deep longing for fulfillment, we are held lovingly in God’s hands.  He is molding us, shaping us, transforming us, and fashioning awesome deeds through us – things so amazing that we could not begin to even hope for them.

Therefore, we can also hear in today’s Gospel a kind of answer to Isaiah’s lament, and to our questions of longing.  In just a very short section of Mark’s Gospel, we heard Jesus say three times, in three different ways: “Be watchful, be alert;” “Watch, therefore;” and finally, just “Watch!”

Our observance of Advent is indeed a kind of watching and waiting, but not merely for the arrival of Christmas Day four weeks from now.  We are watching and waiting for the Day of the Lord, the return of Jesus Christ in glory, which will usher in “a new heaven and a new earth.”

In other words, we are longing for, and watching and waiting for, the Day of the Lord because it is Jesus’ return in glory that will be the answer to all of our longing and all our desires.  It is in Jesus’ coming that the potter will complete the work He has already begun and is currently doing in our lives.

So our Advent longing is rightly shaped by the great virtue of hope.  Not by easy answers, or pious platitudes about how everything will work out in the end, but by the deep and overriding conviction that God is not at all absent from the world.  He has, in fact already “rent the heavens and come down” – He has already shown us His human face in His Son, Jesus Christ.  He holds us in His hands at every moment of our lives and He is constantly molding and forming us.

Finally, that’s why St. Paul says in our second reading: “in Him you were enriched in every way . . . so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

During this Advent season, like children making their wish-lists for Santa, we should become more and more aware of the truest longings of our lives, and we should find in the Liturgy and in the Scriptures the words to express that desire and those longings. 

But Advent should also help us become more and more aware of the spiritual gifts that we have already been given to aid us now in our waiting.

Like the servants in today’s Gospel, we have each been given our own work to accomplish while the Master is away – some task that will help shape and form us, and the world, into the creation God has always intended. 

When He returns, Jesus expects to find us accomplishing this work; using the spiritual gifts we have been given; cooperating with His graces; performing the “righteous deeds” we spoke of in our opening prayer. 

We know that our work will not, by itself, be capable of accomplishing the things we long for most.  But using our spiritual gifts as best we can helps remind us of the potter who is at work in and through us – it helps us to see that, even amidst our waiting and longing, we have been given so many signs which prove that Christ’s coming kingdom is, in fact, already being molded and formed in our midst.