Happy New Year, Liturgically Speaking

“God walks into your soul with silent step. God comes to you more than you go to Him. Never will his coming be what you expect, and yet never will it disappoint. The more you respond to his gentle pressure, the greater will be your freedom.” Bishop Sheen, Simple Truths

Christmas is coming. What is Christmas? It is the celebration of the beginning of John’s gospel, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The Nativity, the coming of the Incarnate Word into the life of humanity, the new Adam, is what Christmas is about. God coming into our world in a way no one expected. A new beginning. And we prepare for this new beginning through Advent. As we are already approaching the Third Sunday of Advent, it seems a little late to wish everyone a “Happy (liturgical) New Year, but it is never too late to make a new beginning.

Advent. We have embarked on a new Liturgical year, Cycle C. Advent signals a call to think about the coming of the Incarnate Word to save mankind, our Savior. “The dungeon in which we ourselves imprison ourselves is our selves. … We forge the chains of our own bondage. We use our freedom to destroy our freedom. We need a savior.” (Dr. Peter Kreeft, Food for the Soul, Cycle C) Jesus came to free the captives. We are the captives, and we have enslaved ourselves by our sin. We need Jesus in order to break those chains.

It is a time of hope, anticipation, humility, and penance. The priest reflects the coming of Jesus during the blessing of the gifts at every mass when he says (quietly) “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Bishop Sheen comments on this fact, “It is hard for a human being to understand the humility that was involved in the Word becoming flesh.” (Sheen, Life of Christ)

This is the meaning of Advent, the declaration that Christ is coming and our preparation for this joyful event. Additionally, we are to prepare ourselves for His second coming when he will come in judgment. For this reason we hear passages in the readings that could easily pertain to the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. In fact, the readings for the First Sunday in Advent get right to the Second Coming of our Lord. At one point John the Baptist talks of Jesus’s coming in this cautionary fashion: “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

It is a call to “Be vigilant at all times” (Mt 24:42, Mk 13:33, 1 Cor 16:13), as well as a time of hope. All of the prophesies which are read during this time of year reflect the fact that God keeps His promises, and therefore, as Pope St. John Paul II noted, “Advent is a powerful proclamation of hope.” (General audience, December 17, 2003)

The readings include several prophesies predicting the coming of Jesus, the Messiah. Jeremiah says, “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and Judah. ... I will raise up for David a just shoot.” Following this, Jeremiah tells us, “For thus says the LORD: David shall never lack a successor on the throne of the house of Israel.”

Paul tells us, “the Lord is near” (Phil 4) and the psalmist will announce, “among you is the great and Holy One of Israel.”

Even the place of His coming is foretold; the prophet Micah tells us that Bethlehem is the place from which “shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.” The town of bread welcomes the Bread of Life.

Bishop Sheen notes: “every other person who ever came into this world came in it to live. He came in it to die.” (Life of Christ)

This fact is often overlooked at this joyful time of year. But we should reflect on it as during Advent we also consider Jesus’s second coming, which could not occur without his death, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven.

But for all of the joy of this time of year, the devil is still marching on our society. He is relentless. For example, Father Oforka, in his book The Art of Spiritual Warfare, describes the situation in Ezekiel’s time: “Ezekiel prophesied at a time when there was great moral decadence in Israel. There was pervasive godlessness and anarchy. People shed blood with reckless abandon.” There are many similar examples throughout the Old Testament.

And our current state of affairs was described by Pope Leo XIII in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei (1885): “Where liberty is mistaken as license, the State, troubled as it will be, must grow. The State stands in for God. Some men will try to alter for their purposes the unalienable nature of marriage. The liberty of the Church will be curtailed, for the State will seek, either to forbid the action of the Church altogether, or to keep her in check and bondage to the State.” He could have written that last month for an editorial on the election.

Evil was at work even at the joyous time of the Nativity. After Christmas we will read that the Holy Family will be forced to flee to Egypt as Herod, the embodiment of evil at the time, murders the male children of Bethlehem and its vicinity in his search for Jesus to kill Him. Let not our joy for the coming of Christ make us complacent so that we let down our shields and let the secularism of our time overtake us, thus murdering our spiritual lives.