Third Sunday of Advent A

“Be patient, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient.” Today’s second reading from the letter of Saint James encourages us to be patient. We are waiting for the Lord and we don’t know when he is coming. We know he is going to be born on Christmas’ day, but we don’t know when he is coming for us, to pick us up, to take us to the place he has prepared for each one of us. He is very keen to show it to us, but we are not ready, because we are still here.

Patience is a virtue we don’t talk about much. It is not a glamorous virtue, a talent to be proud of, but we all need it. We all know people we find difficult to put up with: at work, at home, among our relatives or friends, at church, on the street, waiting in a queue, driving the car, or being put on hold when we make a phone call. We get upset, frustrated, we lose interior peace or we become anxious. In all these circumstances we fail to identify the virtue we need to keep cool, to maintain our serenity and to have inner joy. And it is called patience.

It is important to discover how patient God is with us. Just like the parents of small children. This is what they learned when they had their first baby. It changed their lives completely because it has become a twenty four seven job. They grow immensely in this virtue thanks to their love they feel for their children. Love can be crazy and makes parents do things we are not ready to do for other people. A baby is cute and brings out the best in us. But to do the same with old people demands Christian charity. The knowledge of how much our parents have done for us, help us to do what we can for them, when they are in need during their old age.

The same with God. When we look at him as a Father, we realise that everything that has happened in our lives has a meaning. Either he allowed things to happen, used our silly stubbornness to bring out some good in us, or to plan things in a way that events that appear awful, will help us in the long run. We, like little children, are not aware of it, even when we rebel or throw tantrums. When we look back at our lives, we can begin to understand what God has been doing and we become patient and grateful for God’s actions. His plan is a long term plan. We are impatient and we want things here and now. When we see how patient God is with us, we can learn to be patient with others. God is working with each one of us and we need to wait for the other life to understand things completely.

For this virtue it is important to go to our mother Mary. Mothers are schools of patience. You can see how women change when they have a baby; they grow and mature, even physically. Contemplating Mary looking at baby Jesus, we can learn and develop our patience with others.

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Second Sunday of Advent

Today the Church presents to us John the Baptist as a model to follow. He was the Precursor, the one who comes first. His mission was to open the ways of the Lord, to give witness to the light, to prepare men’s hearts so that Christ may enter. Our mission is to follow in his footsteps. He came two thousand years ago; now it is our turn. How do we do that, if we have lost our way and our life is in complete darkness? We need first find the way, and make sure our soul is full of light. This is what we need to do these days. It is our task for this Advent. John the Baptist leads the way and gives us an example.

It is not easy to be a Precursor, to open the way, to go before foretelling the coming of another, becoming a bridge between two different sides. The Pope is called Pontifex, a bridge builder. We Christians are called to build bridges between people, to be forerunners of Christ in the world, torches that shine amid the darkness of this mad society of ours. John leads us to eternity and then other people can follow our path. It is not easy to find the narrow gate that opens to paradise.

What did John do? He went into the desert, to find silence, solitude and simplicity. He ate locust and wild honey and was dressed in camel hair. We too need to seek a wilderness around ourselves, where we can speak in silence, the language of God; to find solitude, to spend time with God alone; and to live the simple life of John the Baptist. What is the desert for me? In this time of Advent we need to find that space where we can develop our spiritual life, to be able to see things with different eyes, through God’s eyes. We eat locust, things we don’t want to eat; we dress rough, with the garments of modesty; and look for honey, the sweetness of God.

John the Baptist was tough. You wouldn’t like to meet him alone in the desert. His body looked like it was made of roots of trees; his skin was hard and burnt; his hair was meshed like a wild beast; his voice had the sounds of thunder; his eyes burned with prophetic fire. You couldn’t hold his gaze. Only Jesus managed to do so, when John didn’t want to baptise him. They almost had a wrestling match. To follow him we need the gift of fortitude, not to be afraid of the elements, to be able to defend the truth, even though we can lose our head as he did. Fortitude is the only gift of the Holy Spirit that it is related to a cardinal virtue.

John the Baptist is the only saint that we celebrate twice, his birth and his martyrdom. We normally celebrate the dies natalis of the saints, the day when they were born to eternal life, when they died. But Saint John, before he was born, he was sanctified in his mother’s womb, when his mother Elizabeth met Jesus’ mother; both were pregnant at that time. This is how both babies met, and John leapt in the womb with the infusion of the Holy Spirit. We, on the contrary, were born in sin and we need to wait till we die, to enter back into the bosom of God. We are now waiting with great expectation the birth of Jesus, who is still in his mother’s womb. We should follow in his mother’s footsteps to be there at his birth.

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First Sunday of Advent

Watch out, the Lord is coming, the Lord is very near. This is what the liturgy is reminding us these days: to be awake, to be vigilant, to be ready. In a crescendo manner, putting pressure with the passing of days, the prayers of the Mass are telling us slowly that he is coming: he is on his way, he is getting there, only a few days to go, he is almost here, he is knocking at the door, he is already opening the door. When he comes, we need to be with our mobile phones on, our camera open, ready for a selfie. He cannot finds us playing games, sending messages or surfing our favourites sites. Otherwise he will keep going, without stopping in our hearts.

We are celebrating the three comings of our Lord. He came two thousand years ago as a man. He is going to come again at the end of time as a judge. He is coming now as a baby. But he is also constantly coming to meet us personally, in our hearts and minds. Christmas is a reminder of this reality. Jesus not only will come to pick us up when our time is up, but he wants us to experience his presence now in our daily lives.

We need to tell him that we are waiting for him, that we want to be with him. People in love do this all the time. We know we need him, but we forget, we become distracted, we get side tracked. We need to be reminded of this reality. This is what advent means, “Parusia” in Greek, “Adventus” in Latin: presence, arrival, coming. “Marannatha” in Hebrew or “Veni Domini Iesu”, in Latin, meaning “Come Lord Jesus.” Maranatha is two words in Hebrew and is found only once in the New Testament, at the end of the first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians. At the very end of the Bible, in the last words of the book of Revelation, Saint John says: Come Lord Jesus. It is a cry that we all should repeat often these days, fostering a desire, waiting in expectation for his coming.

The Prophet Isaiah reminds us what we need to do: “Make straight a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low.” We need to build a road, a freeway, to make it easy for us to reach him. We should flatten the mountains and fill the valleys. We need to prepare the surface of our lives to reach him better and faster. The mountains are our addictions, those things that we give too much importance to, that try to take over and easily are out of control. What are those things? Work, finances, family, entertainment, social media, hobbies, sport. What we call wealth, honour, power and pleasure. We need to put a measure on them, to restrict them, to bring them down to their proper place. We should be sincere and seek to acknowledge the lack of balance. And fill the valleys; give importance to what’s important: God and others. Look after our relationship with God and with people around us: our prayer life, spending time with our loved ones, helping people in need, reaching out to the poor and the disabled. Both, mountains and valleys, are correlated, they don’t exist one without the other. We need to fix them both at the same time. We should have our priorities right, and Advent gives us an opportunity to do so.

We tend to have two attitudes, a passive one, waiting for the Lord, or an active one which is better still: coming out to reach him. Like the sensible virgins, who came out of themselves, to greet the bridegroom, when they heard the voice that he was coming, we too, need to have our lamps ready, with plenty of oil, burning brightly, illuminating our highway that lead us to his presence.

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