ADVENT 2007-08

Abbot Raymond - Morning Chapter

ADVENT 2007-08

For the Gospel of the very first Sunday of Advent we might expect the Church to choose a passage that turns our minds directly to the proximity of her annual celebration of the birth of Christ. But we won’t find anything of that in today’s Gospel. Instead She chooses a Gospel that turns our minds to the consideration of the proximity of our personal death. The implication being made is surely that it is precisely, at the moment of our own personal death that we will first personally encounter the Christ face to face, and no matter how young we may be, that encounter is, for each of us, relatively proximate. “Stay awake!” says Jesus, “Stand ready! Because….” No matter who we may be or what the times and seasons for any one of us…”The Son of Man is coming at an hour we do not expect”.
Perhaps we could do well this Advent to make this theme the background to our preparation for Christmas. We could make it a preparation for; a looking forward to; that definitive moment of our own personal lives when we will come face to face with the living Christ; or rather, that definitive moment when He comes to us.
This will be the moment when we come face to face with Jesus:
not as the sacramental Jesus of the Eucharist,
nor as the liturgically new-born Jesus of the Christmas season,
nor as the Jesus whom we encounter in our prayer life;
but as the Risen and Living Christ of Glory. The Christ in all the splendour of his Godhead and of his glorified humanity.
This is surely the message of today’s Gospel: that our death will not be a lonely journey into the next world. Jesus himself has described it for us very differently. He describes it, not as a going out of ourselves from this world to him in the next, but rather as an advent, a coming of Himself to us in this world to take us by the hand and lead us into the next. “I am going away to prepare a place for you” he says “….and I will come back to take you to be with me where I am.” And in case we should think of this final personal advent with fear, Jesus himself is careful to take away any sense of awe and fear we might have. This he does by portraying it for us in that homely post-resurrection scene where he stands on the shore of eternity, as it were, and invites the Apostles to “come and have breakfast”.
Now is the time then to prepare ourselves to welcome this inevitable and utterly personal Advent of the Lord to us with a Faith and a Love that cry out “Come then, Lord Jesus, Come.”