The Childlike Joy We Need This Advent, First Tuesday of Advent, December 2, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help, Champion, WI
Tuesday of the First Week of Advent
December 2, 2014
Is 11:1-10, Ps 72, Lk 20:21-24

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Advent features a double-dynamism in which we prepare to run out to meet Christ who comes to us in history (Bethlehem), mystery (prayer, the Sacraments, his word, and other) and majesty (on the clouds of heaven at the end of time). To live Advent well, we must enter into what Jesus is trying to do in his triple coming and must learn the dispositions God helps us to see that we need in order to embrace Christ in what he’s trying to do. Today’s readings help us to do both.
• We begin with Jesus himself coming into the world. Isaiah tells us today about the “shoot” that will “sprout from the stump of Jesse.” Jesse was David’s father and David began the Davidic line of kings. Just two generations after David, however, there were attacks to that line and eventually the kingdom of Judah and Israel would be chopped down. Jesse’s line was just a “stump,” but Isaiah foretells that a “shoot shall sprout” from it, fomenting among the Jews the longing for the Messiah, the longing ultimately for Jesus. Isaiah tells us that he would be filled with a spirit of God, that the Spirit would rest on him, the “spirit of wisdom and of understanding, … of counsel and of strength, … of knowledge and of fear of the Lord.” When Jesus entered the Nazareth synagogue to preach for the first time, he cited Isaiah, said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” and gave the purpose of that anointing: “because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor, …  to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free,  and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” He would bring justice to the world, not judging by appearances or deciding by hearsay, and that new ordering of things in his kingdom would bring about a revolution. Isaiah describes it by means of unimaginable consequences in the animal kingdom: then wolves and lambs, leopards and kids, calves and lions, cows and bears, children and cobras, will play together without fear, without bloodshed, without destruction. If that’s what the shoot from Jesse’s stump will bring to the animal kingdom, how much of a greater impact should he have on human beings, when he helps us to live according to his justice, to enter his kingdom, to receive that same Spirit that fills him with wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge and awe of the Lord! That’s the one who is coming in history, mystery, and majesty.
• How are supposed to prepare for that coming? Today the Gospel reveals to us two essential attitudes.
• The first is childlike trust. Jesus praised his Father for his “gracious will” to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom to the “childlike,” to those who trust in his as beloved children, to those who are docile, uncomplicated and dependent on his providential care and love. These mysteries are hidden from the “wise and the clever” of the world not because God doesn’t want them to receive the revelation and come to salvation but because they obscure their own perception of revelation through their own complications and complications. The fullness of that revelation, Jesus says, is the knowledge of the Father and the mystery of his love. The fullness of that revelation is seen in the image of the Father, Christ himself, who incarnated that wisdom. Elsewhere in the Gospel Jesus said that unless we convert and become like little children, we will not inherit the kingdom of God. Unless we learn to trust in him, unless we learn to depend on him, unless we recognize that we’re never going to be “self-sufficient,” no longer dependent on God, but always poor before the riches with which he wants to bless us, we won’t be able to understand his kingdom and receive it like a little child rather than thinking, erroneously, that we need to “earn” it by our own efforts. St. Therese Lisieux said that one of the worst things that can happen to us is when we begin to think we can do everything on our own, to say to God the Father, “Thanks, Dad, but I’ve got it on my own. I no longer need you.” The essence of spiritual childhood is to grasp that we’re always dependent on God, that to grow to full stature in Christ, to grow to Christian maturity, means to enter into Jesus’ divine filiation and recognize that God the Father is always providing, even when we’re unaware.
• The second attitude is joy. At the beginning of the Gospel, St. Luke tells us, “Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.” He was full of joy at the reality that it was God the Father’s “gracious will” to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom to the “childlike.” At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus turned to his disciples and told them, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” All the great heroes of Old Testament times hungered to receive “all the things” that had been handed over to Christ by the Father. They longed to see and hear the fulfillment of all the prophecies in the Messiah who would be Son of God and Savior in a way far greater than they had imagined. Jesus rejoiced at their good fortune. If that’s true, how much greater is Jesus’ joy that we not only behold him in his real presence, hear his words in the Gospel, but have a chance to touch him and be touched by him in a way far more profound than even his disciples when he was proclaiming these words for the first time! This is why St. John, in his first letter, overflowing with joy wrote, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the Word of life … we proclaim now to you … so that our joy may be complete.”
• Jesus came into the world to share that joy and continues to want to fill us with it, but we only will enter into it when we receive it in such a way that we want everyone else to share it, too. We, too, have been anointed with the Holy Spirit in Confirmation precisely to bring the joy of God’s revelation to others. Just as the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and immediately burst through the closed doors of the Upper Room to proclaim the good news of great joy revealed in Christ’s words, life, death and resurrection, so the Holy Spirit wants to fill us with the fruit of joy (Gal 5:22) and help us to bring that joy to others. Pope Francis, in the apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”) he gave us a year ago stressed this connection between joy and sharing the faith. All of salvation history, he said, is a “great stream of joy.” Our Christian joy “drinks of [Jesus’] brimming heart.” “The good news,” he says, “is the joy of the Father who desries that none of his little ones be lost, the joy of the Good Shepherd who finds the lost sheep and brings it back to the fold.” As we pass on the faith to others, the revelation Christ has given to the childlike, we’re not people passing on “new obligations,” but instead “people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet.” This joy is what attracts people to the Gospel, to the source of the joy we share. The whole Church exists, Pope Francis teaches us, to share this joy of Christ, the joy of forgiveness, the joy of communion, the joy that flows from the Father’s love. And when we’ve really experienced this joy, how can we keep it to ourselves. Francis asks, “If we have received the love that restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?,” adding, “The primary reason for evangelizing is the love of Jesus that we have received, the experience of salvation that urges us to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?”
• It’s a great joy for me for the first time to have the privilege to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help which is where these Advent lessons about how to receive Jesus, the Messiah or Anointed One, as children with joy and to share that joy with others, were reiterated in an indelible way. When the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared in this holy spot to Adele Brise in 1859, she gave her a two-fold mission, saying, “I am the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners, and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners….  Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation… Teach them their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing, I will help you.” Her mission was to pray for the conversion of sinners, to pray for the time in which we would really live in God’s kingdom and be able to treat each other not as lions, leopards, wolves, bears, cobras and adders, but as beloved brothers and sisters. And then she was to help people, especially the young, learn about that kingdom, open themselves up to the Sacraments whereby God would help us to recognize that we are his beloved sons and daughters and each others’ spiritual siblings. For the rest of her life, Adele Brise made that two-fold mandate her life’s mission. She began to pray insistently for the conversion of sinners and, though somewhat timid and formally uneducated, started to travel on foot all across the forests and farms in northeast Wisconsin, sometimes journeying more than 50 miles to visit children in their homes and teach them the faith. She soon assembled around her a group of women who, hearing of the message imparted by Mary to her, wanted to share in that prayer and catechesis; together they became Franciscan tertiaries. On this property, Adele opened up an orphanage and Catholic school where they would be able to give catechesis and other schooling for children throughout the region. How much Jesus must have rejoiced here — how much his mother, the Queen of Heaven, must have rejoiced with him! — that so many children had revealed to them the mysteries of the kingdom, that so many were able to rejoice in the gift of God’s love, that so many were prepared to receive the anointing as “little Christs” or Christians in the Sacraments, that so many learned what was needed for salvation.
• That two-fold work must continue and in Advent we’re called to focus on it with special care. Advent is a season of conversion, when we heed John the Baptist’s plea to make straight the ways of the Lord so that the Lord can come to us. We pray for others, we pray for ourselves, we recognize so many others in heaven and on earth are praying for us, to respond to the grace of conversion God is giving us so that we may be with the God who came to be God-with-us. But it’s also a time in which we seek to help others to become more childlike in the faith and to grasp the true meaning of the season, by helping them to see that it’s not about material presents but the Pearl of Great Price whom God the Father gives us from heaven. It’s a time in which we remember with what longing we prepared for Christmas, with the fascination we had before the crèche and ask God to rekindle that childlike love and wisdom so that contagiously we can pass that on to others.
• And the greatest way we do that is here at Mass, where we seek to receive Jesus with the same love and devotion we did as children for the first time, where we recognize that we’re not worthy to receive him under our roof, but that he gives us his word and grace of conversion, where we are emboldened after confession and Holy Communion to “do more” and go out to bring to others this joy. How blessed are our eyes to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world here on the altar! How blessed are our ears to hear him speaking to us today! How blessed are we as a whole to have received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who once again today seeks to come down upon us to make us one body, one spirit in Christ. We turn in prayer to the Queen of Heaven who came down on this spot to give Adele Brise her two-fold mission and her promise to “help” her accomplish it, and ask her to intercede before her divine Son for all the graces He knows we need to become more childlike, to become more filled with joy, so that we might work as hard as Adele did in spending our life to bring that joy flowing from divine filiation out to those around us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: