St. John of the Cross, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Isaiah 41:13-20  +  Matthew 11:11-15
December 14, 2017

…the Holy One of Israel has created it.

The prophecies of Isaiah contain many images of “natural conversion”:  that is, where the earth, vegetation and animals demonstrate a radical, unexpected transformation.  In today’s First Reading, for example, Isaiah prophecies in the name of the Lord:  “I will turn the desert into a marshland, and the dry ground into springs of water.  I will plant in the desert the cedar, acacia, myrtle, and olive”.

Such “natural conversions” might seem hard to believe, but such changes wrought by the Lord pale in comparison to His original works of creation.  Recall the first chapter of Genesis.  God creates out of nothing.  He creates through His Word, but from nothing.  From nothing, something came to be.  Creation is a miracle.  The “natural conversions” prophesied by Isaiah are also miraculous, but less so than creation itself.

During Advent, the Church calls us to repentance and penance, so as to be ready for the Lord’s coming.  When we heed the cry of St. John the Baptist, the prophecies of Isaiah are fulfilled in a way that surpasses his images of “natural conversion”.  Through the Sacrament of Confession, all sins are washed away, and many graces enter your soul.  The conversion is akin to God’s original work of creation.  In the place of the nothingness of sin, God’s grace comes to dwell.  The new creation of sacramental grace is God’s gift to us, through His Son Christ Jesus.

St. Lucy, Virgin Martyr
Isaiah 40:25-31  +  Matthew 11:28-30
December 13, 2017

“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… and you will find rest for yourselves.”

Today’s brief Gospel passage seems to have a simple message.  We might relate it to the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd:  He cares for us, His flock, and gives us rest.  That is why He is coming, and what we prepare for during Advent.  But there is another, different piece to this passage.

Jesus first tells His disciples, “I will give you rest.”  But then He explains His meaning by bidding them, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me… and you will find rest.”  This second sentence qualifies the first in a significant way.

Jesus gives us rest when we take His yoke upon ourselves and learn from Him.  We might be confused by the idea of a yoke bringing us rest:  after all, with a yoke comes a burden to pull.  Who wants to consider himself as a beast of burden?

But aren’t we always carrying a burden throughout the course of life in this valley of tears?  The burden doesn’t accompany the yoke.  The burden is ours by virtue of our fallen nature.  The yoke of Jesus is simply the gift by which we gain the leverage to bear our burden with some composure.  By tradition, of course, we identity the Cross as Jesus’ yoke, and certainly it is through this gift that we shoulder all that weighs heavy in life.

Our Lady of Guadalupe
Zechariah 2:14-17  +  Luke 1:26-38
December 12, 2017

You are the highest honor of our race.

Today’s Responsorial is not taken from one of the psalms, but from the Old Testament Book of Judith.  The verses of the Responsorial, by which the Church praises Mary today, in their original setting praise the Old Testament heroine Judith.  In the thirteenth chapter you can read of Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes, thus freeing her people from foreign control.  The praise that follows, which we hear in today’s Responsorial, is offered by Uzziah, the king of Judah.

Although the transposition of these words of praise to honor Mary makes sense when one reads the verses themselves, the original setting might give one pause.  However, even the setting in which Judith receives praise offers insight into the vocation of Our Blessed Mother, especially as we honor her today under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In the first book of the Bible, after the fall of Adam and Eve, God curses the serpent and declares:  “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”  The Church has always heard these words as foreshadowing the advent of Christ and His mother Mary.  It is through Mary’s vocation as the Mother of God that the power of evil is destroyed.  As we ask the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe on behalf of the unborn and their mothers, we trust that her maternal love will transform our country and world into a culture of life.

Monday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 35:1-10  +  Luke 5:17-26
December 11, 2017

Our God will come to save us!

The refrain to today’s Responsorial is from the First Reading, from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.  It’s rare for the Church, in selecting Scriptural texts for Holy Mass, to weave a verse from the First Reading within the proclamation of the Responsorial Psalm.

“Our God will come to save us!”  This sentence could serve as the motto for the Season of Advent.  It proclaims three things.  It proclaims first that God Himself is the Messiah, the one for whom we wait.  The Messiah for whom we’re waiting is not only human.  The sentence also proclaims that He will come:  we focus on Him as the object of our hope.  Third, He will come to save us.  He will come not to punish us or lecture us, but to save us.

Salvation, however, itself can have multiple meanings.  The first two truths proclaimed by this sentence—that our God will come—lose their meaning if we don’t focus them correctly by understanding what this salvation truly is, and is not.

To be saved implies being saved from something or someone.  This is what the sentence—and Advent—boils down to:  if we need salvation, what do we need salvation from?

Today’s Gospel answers this question.  Jesus works a miracle to focus our attention not on His ability to work miracles, but on the fact that He is the Messiah.  He comes to bring us salvation from our sins.  Our Advent prayers, fasting and good works have the aim of helping us enter into today’s Gospel and living as the men who lower their friend on a stretcher.  Perhaps the Messiah’s response is unexpected by those men, but it’s what we long for during Advent:  “When Jesus saw their faith, He said, ‘As for you, your sins are forgiven.’”

The Second Sunday of Advent [B]
Isa 40:1-5,9-11  +  2 Pt 3:8-14  +  Mk 1:1-8
December 10, 2017

“A voice of one crying out in the desert: ….”

Most of us have driven through western Kansas.  As you drive, and drive, and drive, one thing that’s easy to appreciate is the flatness of the terrain and straightness of the roads.  There are few surprises.  These roads stand in sharp contrast to the paths through western Colorado.  I-70, which is so predictable through western Kansas, begins to wind and curve, bobbing up and down as you pass through Denver and into the mountains.  It begins to make very serious demands on a driver, whereas through most of western Kansas you can almost set your car on auto-pilot because the path is so straight.

“A straight path” is the image the Scriptures turn our gaze to on this second Sunday of Advent.  We know that the goal—the destination—of our whole life on earth is Heaven.  We know that we are to spend our life on this earth loving and serving God and neighbor, so that we will be ready for Heaven when God calls us.

But too often in life, we get obsessed with how fast we’re going.  We get obsessed with moving for the sake of moving.  Yet one of the lessons of Advent is that in our spiritual lives, the direction of our lives is far more important than the speed with which we’re moving.  Many years ago, I attended a meeting of high school parents with school administrators.  There’s only one thing said that I remember.  A father who had served as an Air Force pilot commented on how he thought high school students made their lives more difficult than necessary because, as he put it, they were “all velocity and no vector”.  Is that how we are in the spiritual life?  If so, we’re headed for disaster.

Saint Thomas Aquinas said something similar:  “If, then, you are looking for the way by which you should go, take Christ, because He Himself is the way….  It is better to limp on the way than run off the way.  For a man who limps on the way, even if he only makes slow progress, comes to the end of the way; but one who is off the way, the more quickly he runs, the further away is he from his goal.”

In our Old Testament reading we hear Isaiah prophesying 700 years before the birth of Jesus.  He proclaims the same message as John the Baptist.  The heart of their message is this:  the most profound journey in life is a journey inward.  As we travel by means of God’s grace a straight path into the human heart, we can expect to find there the very God who created that heart.  But to find Him there, we must face two dilemmas of our own making.

Only within our hearts can we find God, and give ourselves to Him in that place of encounter.  Yet when we quiet ourselves, and enter into our hearts, we first realize that our heart is given over to so many other things.  The greatest struggle, the greatest battle in our spiritual life concerns not our neighbor, not our boss or co-workers, our teachers or classmates, not our spouse or our children or parents.  The greatest struggle in our spiritual life arises from the fact that I have not given my own heart completely to God.

Worse yet is that we’ve given our human hearts over not only to distractions, but to sin.  If we spend these weeks of Advent moving outward in all directions, searching for the meaning of Christmas as we journey to the mall to shop, or to the next party to socialize, that road toward Christmas will wind and curve and bob, distracting and tiring us.  During this season of Advent, we heed the call of Isaiah and John the Baptizer by making straight a path into our hearts.  That means clearing it of the debris of sin, looking seriously at ourselves and asking what changes we need to make to accept Christ the Lord as a newborn king:  a king who wishes to die for us, so as to return our hearts to us pure and focused on what is truly important in life.

Saturday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 30:19-21,23-26  +  Matthew 9:35—10:1,5,6-8
December 9, 2017

Jesus went around to all the towns and villages….

Many of the Gospel passages proclaimed during Advent don’t seem to relate to the birth of Jesus.  Today’s passage, for example, concerns the adult Jesus curing the sick, having compassion on the needy, and sending out His Twelve to heal others as He had.  We might argue that this passage is more fitting for the time of Pentecost than Advent.

To experience fruitful growth during Advent, however, we have to reflect on the many advents of the Christ.  The word “advent” means simply “coming”.  To be ready for Christmas demands realizing the many ways in which Christ is to come among man, and within him.

The simplest way to begin realizing Christ’s many advents is to consider an important principle of Christian history and the spiritual life.  This principle is expressed in the old saying, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the cross.”  In other words, the purpose of Jesus’ Incarnation is His Death and Resurrection.

Many of the events that we hear of in Gospel passages during Advent are about the coming of Jesus’ glory on the Cross.  This is a theme spelled out most clearly in St. John’s account of the Gospel.  Nonetheless, all the evangelists describe how Jesus’ public ministry is a time of advent:  preparing for that Holy Week when Christ entered Jerusalem and so into His glory on Calvary.

The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Gen 3:9-15,20  +  Eph 1:3-6,11-12  +  Lk 1:26-38
December 8, 2017

“Hail, full of grace!  The Lord is with you.”

Like the Assumption, our celebration of Mary’s Immaculate Conception tells us something very important about humanity:  that is, humanity as we were meant to be “in the beginning”.  Our belief that Mary was conceived in the womb of her mother, St. Anne, without Original Sin tells us as Catholics that Mary is exactly the type of human being God meant each of us to be.  In the words of St. Paul, “God chose us in him[,] before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his sight, to be full of love.”

This is what our belief in Mary’s Immaculate Conception says about her:  that she was full of love.  We do not believe that Mary is a goddess, or even super-human.  The Blessed Virgin Mary is simply human, what each of us who is human is called to be:  “holy and blameless in God’s sight, full of love.”  That’s how St. Gabriel salutes Mary in the Gospel:  “Hail, full of grace!  The Lord is with you.”

God the Father wanted the best possible mother for His Son, and so He granted the grace to Mary which would make her, for Jesus, a mother who would physically and spiritually give nothing to her Son but the “fullness of love” which God means all of us humans to have.  Yet because Mary is the Mother of Jesus, she is our mother as well.  She is the Immaculate Conception, through whom Jesus entered the world.  Through her each of us is healed, if we accept in faith the gift of healing God wants to give us.  In this season of Advent we meditate on the fact that God’s gift of the Immaculate Conception has made Mary, for each of us, not only the Mother of the Church, but the model for each of us of what it means to accept Christ into our lives.

St. Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Isaiah 26:1-6  +  Matthew 7:21,24-27
December 7, 2017

… we bless you from the house of the Lord.

Likely you’ve had a conversation with a fellow Christian who insists that the entire Bible—from Genesis to Revelation—must be interpreted literally.  The next time that occurs, offer your fellow Christian this sentence from today’s First Reading—“For the Lord is an eternal Rock.”—and ask if the Lord is literally a rock.  The absurdity of the question shows that a single Scripture verse may have multiple meanings, at times transcending the literal meaning.

Most of us would say without hesitation that describing the Lord as “an eternal Rock” is a metaphor.  This metaphor tells us how solid, sturdy and dependable God always is.  That’s a pretty simple and straightforward idea.  Jesus in today’s Gospel uses the same metaphor in a little different way.  In the way that Jesus tweaks this metaphor, He gives us a good Advent reflection.

Jesus says:  “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them[…] will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.”  In Jesus’ comparison here, what does the image of the “rock” stand for?  Jesus Himself answered that “the one who does the will of my Father” “will enter… heaven”.  It’s “the will of [God the] Father” that is the “rock” on which the wise man builds.  God’s holy Will, in other words, is rock-solid.  So we might reflect today on Jesus’ words as an encouragement to ourselves to be more like God:  that is, to be dependable in our decisions, and unwavering in the midst of influences that tempt us to take the broad and easy path.

Wednesday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 25:6-10  +  Matthew 15:29-37
December 6, 2017

For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

The first sentence of today’s Gospel passage sets the scene by echoing two earlier scenes in Scripture.  One scene occurs ten chapters earlier in Matthew.  There, before beginning the Sermon on the Mount, we hear this:  “Seeing the crowds, [Jesus] went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him.”  These disciples are models for us in their ascent of the mountain to be near Jesus.  Of course, both of these occasions in Matthew echo the scene in Exodus where Moses brings the Law of God down from the mountain.  In his Gospel account, Matthew goes to great lengths to portray Jesus as fulfilling what Moses had undertaken.  It’s as the new Moses that Jesus provides for the “great crowds” in two ways.

First, Jesus cures “the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute, and many others”.  Second, knowing the hunger of the crowds, Jesus compassionately works the miracle of multiplying the loaves and fish.  Both of these works of Jesus—healing and nourishing—are also portrayed in the great 23^rd Psalm, which is our Responsorial today.  Of course, to receive nourishment and healing from the Lord, we have to be willing to admit our real hungers and hurts.  In your private prayer today, ask the Lord to enlighten you to see clearly where your mind and heart are in need of healing and nourishing.