Karl Rahner SJ. Second Week of Advent Year II, Sunday

Monastic Office of Vigils, 

SECOND WEEK OF ADVENT Year II

SUNDAY

First Reading    Isaiah 22:8-23

Responsory   Rv 3:7.8

This is the message of the holy and true one, who holds the key of David: + Behold I have put before you an open door which no one is able to close.

V. You have kept my word and have not denied my name. + Behold I have ...

Second Reading

From the writings of Karl Rahner, S.J. (Everyday Faith, 11-13)

The Son of Man is to judge

What was really meant and actually happened by the coming, the "advent," of the redeemer is best gathered from that completion of his coming which we rather misleadingly call the "second coming." For in reality it is the fulfillment of his one coming which is still in progress at the present time. From the picture of the ful­fillment we are to gather what in reality is already happening in the depth of our life and our reality, though unobtrusively and quietly and therefore in a way which in our sinful blindness we may overlook. God has started on his way. He is already there, hidden, and the revelation of his being is at hand.

Now when it is manifest that he has come, we shall see him as the Son of Man. As one of us. As one who has lived our life among us, just as it is, short, bitter, mysterious. It is as the Son of Man that God will then question us about our life. In that judgment we shall not be able to say that he, the eternal in his infinite harmony, cannot after all enter into our life with sympathetic understanding of its fragility and unsolved enigmas. He not merely entered into it by sympathetic understanding, he literally lived it. He himself be­came flesh. Not the remote God but the Son of Man will be the judgment or the justification of our lives. The man who is God will be our judgment. Because he is man, he knows just how it is with human beings. Yet he, the eternal, remote God, is as closely concerned about us as only a man can be who loves what is human and hates inhumanity in man from his own experience.

Is it more blessed or more dangerous to be judged by a man and not solely by a God who was not himself involved in the history he is judging? Who can say? At all events the gospel tells us the fact. The Son of Man is to judge. If, however, the man who is God is to be our judgment, and if in his coming he traveled as we do from the womb of his Mother to the bosom of the earth, then the face of the Son of Man, in which we shall one day read our judgment, already mysteriously gazes at us from every human face, because all are his brothers and sisters: the pure face of the child, the careworn faces of our so-called opponents and enemies.

One day we shall have to "raise our heads" and look into the face of him who comes as Son of Man, for he is after all the God of eternity. And from his countenance all will look at us: all those around us through whom we were good or guilty. A voice will come from that mouth: What you did - or did not - do to the least of my brethren. That voice from that face will not die away and will fill our eternity from end to end. Shall we be able to raise our heads with the confidence of the forgiven and the living to­ward that face of the Son of Man?

Responsory     Jer 33:15; Is 16:5

I will raise up for David a righteous branch; he will do what is just and right on the earth, + and they shall call him: The Lord, our justice.

V. A throne shall be established in mercy, and on it shall sit one who judges justly and seeks what is right. +And they shall ...