Monday of the First Week of Advent
Today's Mass Readings
Yesterday we began our Advent journey in joyful anticipation of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Our first readings will be from the book of the prophet Isaiah for these first two weeks of Advent. The book of the prophet Isaiah, of course, belongs to the Old Testament. It was written many, many years before the Incarnation of Jesus and his birth into the humble town of Bethlehem. And yet much of Isaiah is a prophesy precisely about Jesus, the sign of God-with-us, the embodiment of God’s love for his people. Moreover, although our liturgical year has begun anew with this season of Advent, we see a real continuity with the themes of the last few weeks of the old liturgical year. While our attention is turned to the new beginning that comes with Christ on earth, our attention is also still turned to the final coming and that eternal banquet in the Kingdom of Heaven. These two themes are in fact tied together in Advent and Christmas; Jesus’ first coming as a babe in the manger foreshadows his final coming. Both are acts of God’s love for his people.
The implications of God’s coming among us are great, as indicated by both readings. In the first, the selection from Isaiah, we hear a profound description of the change wrought by God’s presence among us. The people – all nations – will seek to walk in the ways of the Lord and will abandon the fighting and war which has characterized their discontent. Their unity will come through this shared lofty goal, namely, to climb the mountain where they encounter God.
Our psalm, Psalm 22, today re-emphasizes this theme as it describes the joy of approaching Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the holy city, where God’s presence is found in the Temple. And while this presence of God was represented at a literal level by the Holy of Holies within the Temple in Jerusalem, this presence of God is even more profound in the person of Jesus the Christ, who walked amidst Jerusalem and taught in that holy Temple.
Today we find a centurion, a Gentile who we would not expect to recognize God’s presence in Jesus, approaching Jesus to ask for a favor. This man tells Jesus of his own suffering servant, and Jesus responds by quickly offering to visit and heal the servant. The centurion’s response, however, is remarkable: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed” (Mt. 8:8). The centurion acknowledges God-among-us in Jesus, and he simultaneously recognizes his own unworthiness. Yet this unworthiness does not prevent his petition.
We echo the words of this humble centurion each time before we receive the holy Eucharist: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I will be healed.” Like the centurion, we hence recognize God’s presence among us in the person of Jesus whose flesh and blood we are given at Eucharist. We also, like the centurion, recognize our own humility in the face of this great gift. But it does not stop us from seeking God. We cannot let our sinfulness be the end of the story; we must let God’s love for us transform us. We must seek to climb the holy mountain to the holy city. We must strive to encounter Jesus and let him enter our lives regardless of our failings. This Jesus will enter our lives in a profound way in our liturgical celebration of Christmas. But this Jesus is also already God-among-us, inviting us each day to share in his life.
Today, let us reflect on how we might be more open to God’s presence in Jesus, allowing it to transform us. In order to do this, we must be able to identify our sins and patterns of weakness, but we must also be able to offer these to God in the hopes that we may be healed despite our unworthiness. These hopes will not be in vain. Maria Morrow