The connection between the three time frames of Advent is the source of true hope
Posted on November 28th 2010 in Weekly messages
This Sunday the Church once again begins her Liturgical Year. There could be no better time than for us to examine personally the state of our faith, and rediscover the hope that Christian faith carries within itself. Advent is the season of hope, so it looks backwards to the foundation of the Christian’s hope, the birth of Jesus Christ, but also to the future, the realisation of the hope that invites us to enter into that mysterious thing, eternal life. The believer’s orientation towards the future makes sense and gives a solid foundation to the struggles of faith and life here and now. Three time frames come together and inform each other during this period of Advent.
The power of hope gives strength to face both the present moment and also to make sense of it, by placing the flux of everyday life in a bigger context. The beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel portrays an idyllic rural lifestyle, the possible content of countless romantic era paintings, yet its participants fail to see beyond themselves. This is the self-absorption of that idyll and of the contemporary world. One of the effects of the current financial crisis sweeping over Europe is a rude awakening for those caught in this material self-absorption, and its anchor-less companion, the ever-expanding culture of rights and entitlements with no connection or responsibility to the greater whole. This rude awakening will often take an aggressive or violent turn as someone must be found to blame, whether it is the system, the machine, the politicians of the day, the Church, or whatever. It is not that these institutions do not need purification. They most certainly do, as the Church has had painfully to admit, but they are not to blame in the way their protagonists think.
The Christian has no magic wand to waive over these stumbling blocks to the self-absorbed life, nor to their aggressive and violent offspring. Indeed, the Gospel cannot engage with those that live at that level; faith has become a matter either of personal choice or more likely something of irrelevance. The worship of contradictory personal choices, entitlement and right can never sustain a serious hope for the future because they miss the fundamental point, the need for a secure foundation. These are the contemporary gods that have replaced the contradictory myths of the pagan world. Christianity replaced those pagan myths with a true hope founded on God’s revelation, and so today the Church can offer once again a true hope founded on the actions of God, and made known in the person of Jesus Christ. This is the simple message that God loves, and all the transforming dynamic which this entails, the personal journey into oneself, and outward towards God and neighbour. This journey, from the moment of conception to His death and Resurrection, has been given definitive shape by Jesus Christ. Every believer is invited to start, and to restart time and again this journey. One does not have to progress far before grasping that the material world, progress, and later the created world itself, can never be their own justification.
This is the source of hope, knowing God loves. He points us towards the future, when the gifts we experience now will be given in their fullness. The present experience of this future ‘eternal life’ is described as possessing paradoxically a ‘known unknown’. No one knows what eternal life maybe in its fullness. This is the unknown, but enough is understood now of the key message. This is that only true love satisfies, which alone is found in God through Jesus Christ. Love has the power to make sense of the material world and to create something much more beautiful, the holy life. This is a life not cut off from the world but one able to build a visible city of God, a forbearer of the celestial city to which we all aspire.