The season of Advent is the time to look at Christ with renewed intensity
Posted on November 29th 2009 in Weekly messages
The beginning of the Church’s year is the appropriate time to ask the question of ourselves, ‘Is Christ still necessary and does it matter’? This is the moment to engage with the reasons of the heart, and discover the inner centre of our faith. Pope Benedict’s book on Jesus of Nazareth includes a section about a Jewish Rabbi’s imaginary association with the crowds listening to the Sermon on the Mount. Afterwards, he reflects on what Jesus had changed, and the answer, nothing. To a second question, what did He add, the answer was Himself. The conclusion that the Holy Father draws from the rabbi is that there no break between the Jesus of history, and the Christ of faith. The historical figure is no normal Jew; Jesus Christ spoke and acted with the authority given by His filial identity as the Son of God.
The emphasis on Jesus Christ, and His identity as Son with regard to Father, and therefore as ‘adopted’ brother to us, His followers, his adopted brothers and sisters, is a necessary corrective to a vague form of deism that infects even Christians. The temptation to start a description of Christianity with God, rather than Jesus, has a hidden trap in that the transcendence of God precludes a continual and personal involvement with the world. Time and eternity do not integrate convincingly to the secular mind. Something of the closeness that is discovered in religious experience is lost. A similar problem is met when one is confronted by well-meaning individuals who say that there is only one God up there. They are true, God is one, but to say that God is one means something very different to a Christian, a Muslim or Buddhist, let alone a philosopher.
The identity of Jesus initiates a reflection on His relationship to God, whom He calls Father, and to the bond that unites them in the Holy Spirit. In Jesus Christ the eternal enters into time, and He becomes the place to grasp how eternity and time may be united, just as He himself is the place where heaven and earth meet.
This is the One whom the Christian awaits at Advent, suspended between His first coming and the second at the end of time. For most, even for steady believers, there is a constant flow of contrasting experiences between His presence and absence in daily life. Yet if the eternal has entered time, then there is no moment potentially excluded from His saving presence and, if Christ unites heaven and earth, there is no place where He is absent. The consequence of the first coming is that the Christian should put away fear and resignation, because Christ has overcome the world. This is not to minimise the obvious horrors of evil, nor the innocent suffering of so many. Instead, it gives a confidence and purpose to life, of listening ever more attentively to this Jesus Christ who is to come again. The rabbi, in explaining that all Jesus brought was Himself, encourages us that it is only in listening to Him that our faith grow. This internal conversion, and liberation from false goals, will in turn bring about the progressive conversion of the world, through that minute part to which, as individuals, our influence can be applied.