The Attributes of the Advent Encounter with Christ, 1st Monday of Advent, December 3, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the First Week of Advent
December 3, 2018
Is 2:1-5, Ps 122, Mt 8:5-11

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

• In Advent, we focus fundamentally on the Lord’s coming. The word Advent itself means “coming” and points to the fact that during this season we renew our awareness that Christ is coming to us in history, mystery and majesty: history in Bethlehem; mystery in the Sacraments, prayer and in those made in his image and likeness; and in majesty at the end of time and the end of our lives. But we don’t wait passively. Christ’s coming is not the only action in this season. As we prayed yesterday in the collect to begin the Mass, we beg the Father for the grace of “resolve to run forth to meet” his Son “with righteous deeds at his coming.” Like the wise bridesmaids in Jesus’ parable (Mt 25), we head on out to meet him not merely at times that are convenient but in the middle of the night with lighted lamps. The Advent wreath is meant to symbolize by the lit candles that we are burning in expectation of him and that that expectation grows week by week as we run forth to meet him who is coming to us. But we know that our “running” to meet Christ who is coming is not principally something external, but interior. Today’s readings, especially the figure of the Roman Centurion in the Gospel, models for us those interior virtues we need this Advent and beyond to run out to encounter the Lord. In the Gospel, the centurion hears that Jesus is on his way to Capernaum, but he’s not content just to wait for him to show up. He goes out to meet him along the way and meets him at the edge of the city. And he went out with various essential Advent attributes.
• First, he went out to meet him with faith. Jesus is amazed that he, a non-Jew, has so much faith and exclaims, “In no one in Israel have I found such faith.” He had a confident assurance that God could give him the miracle that he sought, even if he didn’t see it done. At the beginning of Advent, we can assess whether we go out to meet the Lord in history, mystery and majesty with this type of faith.
• The second Advent disposition we see in the Centurion is what is at the root of that faith, a sense of obedience that makes him trust in the Lord’s authority. “I too am a man subject to authority,” he said, “with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” The Lord Jesus was amazed at that confident faith, something that came from regular obedience of those in authority and grasping what authority Christ himself must be acting with. Similarly, our obedience — in religious life, in the priesthood, as disciples — helps us to grow in faith, because we know that the Lord acts with the authority of the one who created the heavens and the earth. Advent is a time to run forth in obedience to God and his commands.
• The third Advent virtue also strengthens our faith. It’s humility. When Jesus, having encountered the Centurion, says that he will come to the his home to heal his servant, the Centurion replies that he is not worthy to have Jesus enter his home. Even though he was a powerful leader in the Roman army with many men subject to his beck and call, he was still humble and recognized before Jesus that he did not merit that grace. Advent is a season of humility in which we recognize that we’re not worthy of the Lord who is coming, a reality that is meant to fill us with gratitude at the awesome privilege we have of encountering the Lord. There’s a reason why we use the Centurion’s very words every time we prepare to meet Christ at his coming in mystery during Mass. Advent is a time to advance in the humble awe toward the Lord’s action.
• The fourth Advent disposition is to live it with others. The centurion was united in solidarity with his servant and interceded for him. We prayed in the Responsorial Psalm, “Come, let us,” not “let me,” “climb the mountain of the Lord,” so that he can “instruct us” in his ways. There’s a communal dimension to our faith that is essential to understanding what Advent is about. Jesus didn’t come into the world to save us as a whole bunch of isolated lost sheep. He came to form us into a sheepfold, into a family, into a communion. Advent is therefore a time of particularly focused spiritual and material solidarity. It’s a time that we make a pilgrimage not solo, but with other. Jesus pointed to that communion at the end of today’s Gospel scene when he promises, “I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven.” It’s a pilgrimage not merely with some friends, but a pilgrimage that he wants to be made by people of every nation, and so it’s a pilgrimage to which we intentionally are supposed to be inviting even those we don’t know at all or know well. To make this pilgrimage well, it means that we’re not just doing it along with others, but united with others. We prayed in the Psalm about how the Jerusalem to which the Jews were ascending, and we ascend together spiritually, has “compact unity.” This points to the type of tight bonds of unifying love we’re called to have toward each other. The Lord wants us to make this pilgrimage together with each other, up close, you and me and all those that the Lord places together with us. He wants us to help each other. And one of the greatest ways we help each other is through our prayer, which is another key aspect of today’s reading and our overall Advent dispositions. Just like the centurion’s servant, we all need healing and we need to pray for each other to receive the healing and salvation Christ brings, even at a distance. The Lord wants to do in us something far greater than he did in the Centurion’s servant, not just raising us physically from the point of death but raising us spiritually from the death of the soul through sin. Advent is a season in which we hear St. John the Baptist’s persistent call to make straight the paths of that encounter with the Lord, to level the mountains of pride, to fill up the valleys of a shallow prayer life and to allow the Divine Physician surgically to excise from us in the operating room of the confessional whatever sins in us are killing us.
• The fifth disposition is joy. We prayed six times in the Psalm, “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.” Our joint pilgrimage is one meant to be done with great happiness and enthusiasm. We’re supposed to say, “I rejoiced when they said to me, “We will go up to the house of the Lord!” Jesus came into our world so that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete (Jn 15:11). The Christian life, as Pope Francis wrote in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, is one great “stream of joy,” flowing from Jesus’ “brimming heart.” The Archangel Gabriel’s first words to Mary were “Rejoice!” On Christmas morning, the angels announced to the shepherds “good news of great joy” for all the people. The Lord wants us making the exertion to go up not out of dry duty but out of passionate, enthusiastic joy, a joy that flows from faith, a joy that comes from humility, a joy that can’t restrain itself because of the healing we’ve experienced, as we enter into God’s own joy that rejoices most of all over one repentant and reconciled sinner.
• Someone who lived with these virtues is the great saint we celebrate today. St. Francis Xavier was marked, as we prayed in the opening prayer, by the “zeal of faith” that led him to seek to spread it in multiple places where faith in Christ had never been proclaimed. He was obedient, leaving for the East only the night before at St. Ignatius’ gentle request to take the place of a sick Jesuit. He was humble in his missionary proclamations, treating others with reverence and seeking to serve them, putting their needs above his own; this was shown in relief when he intentionally needed to change to be “prominent” — as apostolic nuncio to the East and representative of Portugal with a large retinue — to proclaim the Gospel to the Japanese who didn’t appreciate the virtue of humility. He wanted everyone to be brought into one family, from far east to far west, and labored for it. And he was always joyful, which is what characterized how so many children were so attracted to him and why he was able to be so successful, because everyone desires happiness and he was able to show them a happiness they couldn’t have without the deep relationship with Christ and experiencing the power of his loving accompaniment even in the midst of life’s great difficulties.
• I’d like to focus more on the faith that led him to go encounter Christ in the various persons of India, Borneo, Malaysia, Japan, and even the shores of China. Today the Church has us pray that we might have the same passion, raising up to God the petition in the Opening Prayer of the Mass that we might “burn with the same zeal” and in the Prayer after Communion that God will “enkindle in us that fire of charity with which St. Francis Xavier burned for the salvation of souls.”  Every year priests, religious and all those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours ponder this letter he sent in 1544 to his friend, former college roommate and religious superior, St. Ignatius of Loyola: “We have visited the villages of the new converts who accepted the Christian religion a few years ago. … The native Christians have no priests. They know only that they are Christians. There is nobody to say Mass for them; nobody to teach them the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Commandments of God’s Law. I have not stopped since the day I arrived. I conscientiously made the rounds of the villages. I bathed in the sacred waters all the children who had not yet been baptized. This means that I have purified a very large number of children so young that, as the saying goes, they could not tell their right hand from their left. The older children would not let me say my Office or eat or sleep until I taught them one prayer or another. Then I began to understand: ‘The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’ I could not refuse so devout a request without failing in devotion myself. I taught them, first the confession of faith in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, then the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father and Hail Mary. I noticed among them persons of great intelligence. If only someone could educate them in the Christian way of life, I have no doubt that they would make excellent Christians. Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians. Again and again I have thought of going round the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: ‘What a tragedy: how many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!’ I wish they would work as hard at this as they do at their books, and so settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them. This thought would certainly stir most of them to meditate on spiritual realities, to listen actively to what God is saying to them. They would forget their own desires, their human affairs, and give themselves over entirely to God’s will and his choice. They would cry out with all their heart: Lord, I am here! What do you want me to do? Send me anywhere you like – even to India.” Reading those words soon after they were published for the first time, the future St. Philip Neri went to his spiritual director and said that he thought the Lord was asking him to follow Francis to India. His wise spiritual director told him, “No. Rome will be your Indies!,” and St. Philip worked as hard bringing people back to the faith in Rome after the sack and so much debauchery as St. Francis Xavier had been doing in far away lands. Likewise, for us, Manhattan must be our Indies. There’s no reason why we can’t do here what St. Francis did in Goa, Malaysia and Japan. He had 46 chromosomes just like us. He needed to eat, sleep and go to the restroom just like us. But he burned with the love for Christ for those who did not know him. And when we burn with a similar fire, we will say, as he wrote in that 1544 letter, “Send me anywhere you like,” as the Lord said to me four years ago today through Bishop Da Cunha in Fall River when he told me that he was sending me here to New York to work at the United Nations and among the Sisters of Life.
• So as the Lord comes to us this Advent, we run out to meet him with faith, obedience, humility, together with others, and joyfully. And the best way we grow in these dispositions is here at Mass as we prepare now to meet Jesus with faith acknowledging him as our Lord and God; with humility recognizing we’re not worthy to receive him; with conversion, begging him to say the word so that our souls will be healed; together with others, made “one Body, one Spirit” in Christ; with joy, because we’re about to receive within the “pearl of great price!,” and open to allowing his glory to flow through us as sap from vine to branches. Our response to the Mass is to say, “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord” so that he may “instruct us in his ways” in the Liturgy of the Word and so that he might strengthen us to “walk in his paths” by entering into us in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. This is where our Advent begins.

The readings for today’s Mass were: