Papal Words About the Liturgy

Details: 24 November 2010

Advent - Time

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, preaching about the First Sunday of Advent, says that, as we begin a new liturgical year, "this season invites us to reflect on the dimension of time, which always exerts great fascination over us. We all say we do not have enough time because the pace of daily life has become frenetic for everyone. In this regard, the Church has some good news to bring. God gives us His time. We always have little time, especially for the Lord. We do not know how (or sometimes we do not want) to find it. Well, God has time for us! This is the first thing that the beginning of the liturgical year makes us rediscover with ever new amazement. Yes, God gives us His time, because He entered our history with His Word and with His works of salvation to open it to eternity, to make it become a covenantal history."

"In this perspective, already in itself time is a fundamental sign of God’s love, a gift that man, as with everything else, is able to make the most of, or, on the contrary, to waste, to take in its significance or to neglect with obtuse superficiality."

Three Time Points

The Successor of Saint Peter notes, "There are three great points in time which delineate the history of salvation: at the beginning, creation; then the incarnation-redemption at the center; and at the end the "parousia". The final coming that also includes the last judgment. However, these three moments should not be viewed merely in chronological succession. In fact, creation is at the origin of all things, but it also continues and is actuated through the whole span of cosmic becoming until the end of time. So too, although the incarnation-redemption occurred at a specific moment in history, the period of Jesus’s journey on earth, it nevertheless extends its radius of action to all preceding time and to all that is to come. And, in their turn, the final coming and the last judgment, which were decisively anticipated precisely in the cross of Christ, exercise their influence on the conduct of the people of every age."

"The liturgical season of Advent celebrates the coming of God in its two moments. It first invites us to reawaken our expectation of Christ’s glorious return. Then, as Christmas approaches, it calls us to welcome the Word made Man for our salvation. Yet, the Lord comes into our lives continually. How timely then is Jesus’ call which, on the First Sunday of Advent, is powerfully proposed to us: "Watch" (Mark 13:33-37). It is addressed to the disciples but also to everyone, because each one, at a time known to God alone, will be called to account for his life. This involves a proper detachment from earthly goods, sincere repentance for one’s errors, active charity to one’s neighbor, and, above all, a humble and confident entrustment to the hands of God, our tender and merciful Father."

Waiting

The Bishop of Rome, in words that one can find useful in meditating around a family Advent wreath, also remarks, "One aspect of Advent is a waiting that is full of hope. In this, Advent enables us to understand the content and meaning of Christian time and history as such. Man is always waiting in his life. Mankind has never been able to cease hoping for better times. Christians have always hoped that the Lord will always be present in our history and that He will gather up all our tears and all our troubles so that everything will be explained and fulfilled in His kingdom. At the same time, however, we discover how many different ways there are of waiting. When time itself is not filled with a present that is meaningful, waiting becomes unbearable. If we look forward to something that does not touch us now in any way, if , in other words, we have nothing here and now and the present is completely empty, every second of our life seems too long. Waiting itself becomes too heavy a burden to bear when we cannot be sure whether we have anything at all to wait for. When, on the other hand, time itself is meaningful and every moment contains something especially valuable, our joyful anticipation of the greater experience that is still to come, makes what we have in the present even more precious and we are carried by an invisible power beyond the present moment. Advent helps us to wait with precisely this kind of waiting. It is the essentially Christian form of waiting and hoping."

"Thus Advent means commemorating the first coming of the Lord in the Flesh, with His definitive return already in our minds, and at the same time it means recognizing that Christ is present in our midst making Himself our travelling Companion in the life of the Catholic Church, which celebrates His mystery. In this perspective, Advent becomes for all Christians a time of expectation and hope, a privileged time for listening and reflection, as long as we let ourselves be guided by the liturgy, which invites us to advance to meet the Lord Who comes."

Prepare a Welcome

The Pope says that in Advent we should be "nourished by the word of God in order to be helped to see the world with different eyes, to interpret the individual events of life and history as words that God addresses to us, as signs of His love that assure us of His closeness to every situation. This awareness should prepare us to welcome Him when He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end."

"Come, Lord Jesus (Revelation 22:20) is the ardent invocation of the Christian community of the early days and it must also become the aspiration of the Church in every epoch, which longs for and prepares herself for the encounter with her Lord. Come today, Lord, we should pray. Come to enlighten us, to give us peace, to help us triumph over violence. Come precisely in these weeks of Advent. Let us see Your face, Lord, and we shall be saved! (Psalm 79:3)."

"Advent is the season of the presence and expectation of the eternal. For this reason it is in a particular way a period of joy, an interiorized joy that no suffering can diminish. It is joy in the fact that God made Himself a Child. This joy, invisibly present within us, encourages us to journey on with confidence. The Lord Jesus came in the past, comes in the present, and will come again in the future. He embraces all the dimensions of time because He died and rose. He is the Living One. While He shares our human precariousness, He remains forever and offers us the stability of God Himself. He is Flesh like us and Rock like God."

The Holy Father has often urged us not to become slaves to consumerism and to keep from making our Christmas preparations nothing but "a marketer’s paradise." Listening to him and heeding his words can assist us in restoring to some extent the season of Advent to its proper and appropriate spiritual dimension in our lives, to heading off the encroaching and enveloping secularism that seems to be, like an evil cancer, eating into the reality of our annual celebration of the Solemnity of the Nativity, and to making our Christmas not superficially, but profoundly and supernaturally merry. May it be so.