Today is the First Sunday of Advent, which in the Catholic Church means the beginning of the new Liturgical Year. We Catholics are urged to prepare ourselves for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ into the world as proof of God’s love for humanity … which we all learned from John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved trough Him.”
So how should we prepare ourselves for the coming of our Savior, which as we all know is Christmas Day? We must reunite our souls with God through the Sacrament of Repentance (go to confession) and receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ in Holy Communion with grace. As we know, Christmas Day happened 2,000 years ago, but as our Lord Jesus Christ himself promised us… “I shall be with you till the end of time.” We all know that God is truth and therefore he cannot lie to us and thus he has kept his promise through the institution of the Holy Eucharist.
But we know too well that God never forces His love upon us, which is why He gave mankind His free will. In these harsh times, when the world is suffering from natural or man-made disasters and very recently, the gruesome massacre in Maguindanao by demons … we must turn back to God as it is only through Him that we can truly attain real peace and joy in our hearts because God’s love is everlasting, while human love ends with our death.
But the decision to love God is left entirely to us, which was put very simply by St. Augustine of Hippo, “The God who created us without us, cannot save us without us!” So let us prepare our bodies and our souls for the coming of Christmas and show God that we are the “Anawim” people who are “poor in spirit”, where in the Beatitudes, Jesus proclaimed, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The keyword here is “humility” where one completely understands that all that we have and all that we are came from the grace of God, not through our own doing.
The word “poor” is more often than not, misunderstood to mean the people wallowing in poverty. God knows that many of the poor are even ungodly, blaming God for their poverty. These people are just as lost as their rich counterparts who have everything, but they don’t believe that God gave them the blessings that they are enjoying on this earth. Being “poor in spirit” means emptying ourselves with things that deflect our attention to God because when we open our hearts to the Lord, and then we are allowing God’s will to operate within us… His will… not our will.
When we go to confession, we then enter the realm of “Metanoia” having a change of heart or a spiritual conversion. Many Catholics, who believe that once they are baptized into the Catholic Church they don’t need any conversion anymore, also gravely misunderstand this. Conversion for uneducated Catholics is a Muslim turning Catholic or an Evangelical Christian returning to Catholicism. Let me say it here that a good Catholic is one who always goes on a spiritual conversion … after all, as human as we are, as Jesus once said, “Even a just man sins seven times a day.”
To prepare ourselves for the coming of Christmas, the gospel reading today comes from Luke 21:25-28, 34-36 which is appropriately entitled, “The Coming of the Son of Man.”
“[Jesus said to his disciples] 25 “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth nations will be dismay, perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26 People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and glory. 28 But when these signs being to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.
34 “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise 35 like a trap. For that day will assault everyone who lives on the face of the earth. 36 Be vigilant at all times and pray that you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.”
While Advent is our wake-up call to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Son of Man, however there is no one here on earth and in heaven who knows when our Lord Jesus Christ will come again as only God the Father knows when this will happen. But the suggestion to prepare ourselves is just as good… who knows long before the second coming of Christ, we just might “kick” that proverbial bucket and die unexpectedly. So let’s hear it once more from St. John the Baptist, “Repent and prepare the way of the Lord.”
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