Saturday of the First Week of Advent

Today's Mass Readings

We usually think of Christmas, not Advent, as the time of giving- but, really, all times are times of giving. Although we may not always realize it, we receive everything that we have as a gift from God. As the Creed insists, we believe in the God who is “creator of heaven and earth, of all that is- seen and unseen.” If we allow ourselves to seriously contemplate our own Faith, we find that we believe that everything stems from God’s giving. If this is true, then all of our experiences find their origin in God, who continuously sustains all things. Everything that we are and everything that we have- all of our lives have their source in the LORD God Almighty, who is the beginning and the end of everything that was, and is, and will be. Our conscious recognition of this tenet of our faith, that all of creation is already the gift of God, serves as an important background for today’s readings. While they might at first appear to speak merely of “future” giving from God (in the first reading) or “past” gifts from God (in the Gospel reading), we must never allow ourselves to forget that God’s gifts are continuous. What the readings are highlighting, then, is not the fact that sometimes God gives- because the very fact that we live and breathe is itself already a testimony to God’s ceaseless giving- but is rather proclamation of how God gives. According to the reading from Isaiah, God wants to comfort us in our weeping and end our cries of pain and abandonment. God seeks to give us the nourishment we need, He wishes to teach us about Himself (which He did to perfection in Jesus), and He intends for us to cooperate with Him in the cultivation of this earth. And, in the darkest days of our lives, when we feel like we may have lost all hope, God promises to bind our wounds, heal our bruises, and gather us to Himself.

The difficulty that we often have with passages like this, of course, is that there are plainly people who do not have the basic necessities for survival and who are forced to endure cruelties and hardships that seem almost beyond belief. And, in the midst of such tragedies, we often ask ourselves why God does not intervene on the behalf of these victims. As it happens, an answer to this question may perhaps be found in our Gospel reading for today. There we see the Lord Jesus traveling wherever He can, healing the sick and preaching the Gospel. And we see Him react to the suffering of the people with pity and sadness, recognizing their feelings of fear, pain, and abandonment. And His response to this situation is that there do not seem to be enough willing laborers. He does not pray that God merely heal all the illnesses and end all the injustices in the world. Instead, He summons His followers to go into world and do the things that He has done.

If we let this passage speak to us, practically, then the response that Jesus teaches to us is that we ought to do more for one another and that we ought to be willing to give more of ourselves to each other. All that we have, we have received from God- whether we recognize it or not. The LORD God gives us all the things that we have- all the things that we are to share with one another- and He gives them to us freely, without asking us to repay Him. Of course, there is no way that we could repay God- for there is nothing that we could ever give to Him that does not already belong to Him. But what God asks of us is that we give of ourselves to one another, just as He has given of Himself for us- in all creation but most especially in His Son. This is especially important to remember during these next three weeks, as we continue to prepare ourselves to receive that gift.

And so, in the end, the message of today’s readings appears to be twofold. First, God is gracious and He gives us all we have. Second, God asks us to share all that we have with one another. For, as Jesus says to His apostles, “Without cost you have received, without cost you are to give.”

Matthew Minix