First Sunday of Advent – Year C
November 29, 2015
Like many people I have been see the movie series: The Hunger Games/Mockingjay
- It has extraordinary visuals and a barely believable story.
- But it balances the end of the world (presumably through climate change) with human sinfulness (the survival of the fittest) and greed.
- Like the Bible story of Noah and the Ark, the people scramble to get into the Ark in a great flood.
- I missed the end of the film because my Dad, at the time, could abide 3 hour movies.
- However, I have discovered the end is a new beginning, much like Noah. Noah receives a fresh land from the great flood.
- Today’s gospel, on the first Sunday of Advent, is a dramatic story of the end, on the eve of a new beginning, with the birth of Jesus.
- It speaks about at least two realities of Christian living. First, our failure to hope in the face of what we think of as a tragedy and a curse.
- Second, our inability to understand that, for Christians, nothing new and worthwhile happens except in the face of apparent loss and bereavement.
- Hope is most certainly a virtue but it is also a kind of natural virtue. It belongs to human beings to want to hope.
- Nobody really wants to give up and, when we do, we fall into desperation and a grab at things in this world, including sin, to dull reality. This is described by Luke as hearts that are coarsened and gripped by self-indulgence, including the medication of alcohol, so much an Australian sport.
- But being natural does not make hope easy. On the contrary, like a good death, it is hardly won. That is, won but only just. Nevertheless a victory.
- I understand hope as the natural attitude of the soul but, very often, it falls apart in the face of difficulties, opposition and the normal burdens of life (loneliness, dispiritedness and isolation), including the thought there will never be a new day.
- To lose hope then is to lose one’s soul and too often that is what we see when human beings self-medicate or pleasure and deceptive living.
- The second reality that we must contend with is that very often we hope against hope. This is an expression that I borrow from Saint Edith Stein. She most certainly shaped this experience, hope against hope, from the experience of unspeakable crimes against the Jews in the Shoah (the burning).
- In this crucible the space for hope seems lost.
- In fact, it may be lost too but hope fights against its very extinction.
- In this sense, we heed the words of the gospel: pray for the strength to survive and then stand with confidence before the Son of Man.
- With these two thoughts, that can become prayers, we welcome the Messiah within the Jesus we await.
- We see our need for God’s coming by viewing our own shaky ground, steeped in a failure that only God can redeem.
- Our life is characterized by endings; God’s life is characterized by beginnings.
- Towards our end, we must not lose our soul: and that soul (which is hope) releases life; for it is made by God and carried within it the life of God. That life we only know as hope! But, in the end, it will show itself as new life – eternal life. The life of the soul.