Monday of the Third Week of Advent
Numbers 24:2-7,15-17  +  Matthew 21:23-27

He guides the humble to justice, / he teaches the humble his way.

Humility is not a virtue with much currency in the modern world.  The modern world would be more likely to consider humility a vice or stumbling block to virtue.  The modern world’s key principle is what Nietzsche called the “will to power”.

Yet the Gospel from beginning to end is a way marked by humility.  We might say that humility is in fact each step along this way.  This is why St. Thérèse called the living of the Gospel the “Little Way”.

This little way begins with St. John the Baptist, who in different ways appears at the start of each of the four Gospel accounts.  This way leads to Mount Calvary and the Via Dolorosa.  There we learn that the Cross is the Lord’s will to power.  Let’s listen to St. John the Baptist’s message since he teaches us the first steps along His way.

Saturday of the Second Week of Advent
Sirach 48:1-4,9-11  +  Matthew 17:9,10-13
December 11, 2021

Then the disciples understood that He was speaking to them of John the Baptist.

Both the First Reading and the Gospel Reading of this morning’s Mass speak of the Old Testament prophet Elijah.  His importance in the Old Testament is highlighted by the fact that he (along with Moses) appears with Jesus at the Transfiguration.

There are eighteen prophetic books in the Old Testament.  Yet Elijah’s importance is highlighted by the fact that he’s also mentioned within the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament:  in the case of this morning’s First Reading, in the Book of Sirach.  In this passage, Elijah is brought to our attention not only because he has a prophecy for us to attend to, and not only because at the end of his earthly life he ascended to Heaven in a flaming chariot.  Such is the holiness of Elijah that the person is “blessed” who “shall have seen [him] and who falls asleep in [his] friendship.”

In the Gospel Reading, however, Jesus mysteriously identifies St. John the Baptist with Elijah.  While Jesus does not elaborate upon this identification, we know that Elijah and St. John the Baptist are both ultimately important for the same reason:  because they foreshadow the advent of the Messiah.  As we reflect upon the prophetic ministry of Elijah, we ask the Lord to allow Elijah’s words and deeds to motivate us to accept Christ when He comes.

Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 48:17-19  +  Matthew 11:16-19
December 10, 2021

“But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

There are many points that one might conclude from Jesus’ enigmatic statement that “wisdom is vindicated by her works.”  Consider one point about wisdom, and another about wisdom’s works.

Wisdom can be considered from the perspective of God’s own nature, or in terms of what God freely chooses to do in salvation history.  In the Catholic tradition, this consideration would be referred to in terms of the “immanent Trinity” and the “economic Trinity”.

What Jesus declares in today’s Gospel Reading ought to be considered in terms of God’s work of salvation history:  creation, redemption, and sanctification.  This is especially so in terms of wisdom being “vindicated”.  The masterpiece of Saint Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, explores the vagaries of salvation history, which often seems to hold more troughs than peaks; more sin than grace; and more sinners than saints.

When it comes to salvation history, God certainly plays a “long game”.  This ought to comfort those of us who waste so many years of our lives following our own interests rather than God’s.  Saint Augustine explored this sad dynamic in his own life in another of his masterpieces, The Confessions.  Fortunately for each of us, God loves us more than we love ourselves, and in Jesus is willing to make our sins His own so that His wisdom might prevail over our folly.

The Conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo by Fra Angelico

The Third Sunday of Advent [C]
Zephaniah 3:14-18  +  Philippians 4:4-7  +  Luke 3:10-18

“Now the people were filled with expectation, and all were asking in their hearts whether John might be the Christ.”

If there’s one word that sums up the Lord’s coming—both 2000 years ago as He came to Mary, and this year as He wishes to come to you—that one word would likely be “expectation”.  The word “expectation” connotes both waiting and hopefulness.  As an example, think of children during December who write out their wish lists with the expectation of a visit from Saint Nicholas.  However, in English the word “expecting” is also related to the experience of pregnancy, which of course in the person of Mary lies at the heart of Advent.

Yet in today’s Gospel passage, there’s a heightened sense of expectation.  Think of children at the beginning of December expecting St. Nicholas’ visit, and then think of those same children on Christmas Eve, with their expectation brimming over.  The latter is the sense of expectation that the evangelist evokes in today’s Gospel passage, telling us that “the people” were not just in expectation of “the Christ”, but in fact “were filled with expectation”.

Then, however, the other shoe drops.  The evangelist explains that the people “were asking in their hearts whether John [the Baptist] might be the Christ.”  This is bittersweet, since we know that the expectation of the people is misplaced.

Here, though, is a spiritual lesson for us.  The evangelist wants us to profit from the mistake of those who mistook John for the Christ.  Even though you and I know that John the Baptist was not the Christ that the people in today’s Gospel passage were hoping for, we’re not off the hook.

More often than we like to admit, we act like the people in today’s Gospel passage.  We look for Christ in all the wrong places.  Furthermore, without an authentic encounter with Christ, we end up looking for happiness in all the wrong places.

Consider some of the wrong-headed ways that fallen human beings look for happiness in life.  St. Thomas Aquinas, in his summary of theology, explores the more common ways that man falsely seeks lasting happiness in this world.  He names eight, the first four of which are specific goods:  wealth, honor, fame, and power.  While each of these certainly can be good, and can be stepping stones to true happiness, it’s vain to search for lasting happiness in things such as wealth, honor, fame, and power.

Here’s another way to contrast the difference between authentic and false sources of happiness.  All you have to do is reflect on your pet dog Fido.  Fido has some base understanding of the value of food and drink and shelter.  Fido might also appreciate a vehicle:  not only because it saves him from getting tired, but also because he loves to stick his head out the window into the breeze.  It’s true that Fido might have a harder time understanding the value of clothing, although if you took him with you on vacation to Alaska in January, he probably would appreciate that doggie sweater that you got him for Christmas.

But Fido cannot understand coins or bills or stock certificates having any value.  He would only understand that there’s value in the food or whatever else you purchase with money.  Fido is more sane than fallen man.  Maybe that’s why the dog is man’s best friend:  because he keeps us grounded in what is real.

Fido can keep us from looking up at what we should look down upon.  Unfortunately, Fido cannot help us look up to what we ought to look up at.  Fido can help us from having false gods, but he cannot help us find the true God.

In the end, just like Johnny Lee, fallen man spends a lot of time looking for love in all the wrong places, and in too many faces.  There’s only one Face in which fallen man can find abiding happiness, and that’s in the Divine Face of Jesus.

Picture Mary after she gives birth to Jesus.  She looks at the Face of her newborn Son.  As she looks at Him, Mary knows what is truly important in life.  She encounters Jesus as she gazes at Him, and commits herself to Him.  That’s the sort of focus and priority that each of us can strengthen inside our hearts, minds, and souls by celebrating the rest of Advent and Christmastide with joy and faith.

Thursday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 41:13-20  +  Matthew 11:11-15

“And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come.”

St. John the Baptist is a major figure of the early weeks of Advent.  On several of the weekdays in the week leading up to Christmas Day, the Church proclaims passages in which we hear of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.  The Church, through these passages from St. Luke’s Gospel account, wants us to compare the nativities of John and Jesus in order to understand the connection between the two.

Today’s Gospel Reading is set during the public ministry of Jesus, who declares that John the Baptist “is Elijah, the one who is to come”.  How are we to understand this declaration?  The last book of the Old Testament can help us.  In Malachi 3:23 the Lord of Hosts proclaims:  “Now I am sending to you / Elijah the prophet, / Before the day of the Lord comes, / the great and terrible day”.

During Advent we might well identify “the day of the Lord” with the Nativity of Jesus.  But we ought to remember that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in order to die at Calvary.  The day of Jesus’ death on Calvary is more properly “the day of the Lord”, for on that Good Friday the Lord Jesus took upon His shoulders the sins of all mankind.  That day of Good Friday is “the great and terrible day” of which the Lord speaks in Malachi, and for which St. John the Baptist means to prepare us.

St. Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Isaiah 40:1-11  +  Matthew 18:12-14
December 7, 2021

“… it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.”

It’s always comforting to think of the Good Shepherd.  But why does the Church evoke this image today on a weekday of Advent?

In today’s brief Gospel Reading, Jesus speaks to the motive of His Incarnation.  While there have been theologians who have speculated that the Son of God would have become human even had mankind never sinned, in the actual course of salvation history, man did sin.  In response to man’s sin, God could have freely chosen to abandon His fallen creature.

Instead, God chose from Heaven to act like a Good Shepherd.  He descended from the perfection of Heaven in order to enter a world of sin and darkness.  The sacrifice of His whole self—Body and Blood, soul and divinity—within that world reflects the love of God’s divine nature, which through the Incarnation you and I have the chance to enter into for eternity.

Monday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 35:1-10  +  Luke 5:17-26
December 6, 2021

The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom.

In today’s First Reading from the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, “the desert” is a focus.  This focus is apt for the first two weeks of Advent, when St. John the Baptist is so often at the forefront of the scripture passages we hear.  The desert, after all, is where John the Baptist dwells.  In the desert he carries out his ministry of preaching and baptizing, both of these for the sake of repentance.

Yet in spite of the desert’s connection with solitude and penance, and as fruitful as points can be for our Advent meditation, today’s First Reading describes the desert for a different purpose.  Isaiah describes the desert for the sake of illustrating, in a phrase, the “reversal of fortune” that the Lord’s merciful love will effect when He comes.

The desert is a place where little to nothing grows.  Yet when the Lord come, “the parched land will exult”, “will bloom with abundant flowers, and rejoice with joyful song.”  This is not the only reversal of fortune that Isaiah foretells in this passage.  Through the Lord’s power “the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared”, and “the lame leap like a stag”.  The Lord brings life to what seems dead, as the birth of Jesus offers hope for new life to fallen man.

The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Genesis 3:9-15,20  +  Ephesians 1:3-6,11-12  +  Luke 1:26-38
December 8, 2021

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

In the beginning, God had a plan.  God’s plan was for mankind to live a blissful life in this world, and at the end of that earthly life, to rise body and soul into Heaven.

But mankind did not cooperate.  You know how Adam and Eve brought sin into the world.  They did not cooperate with God’s plan, and so God came up with a “Plan B”.  In this “Plan B”, God would show His love for mankind by sending His only Son to earth, knowing that man would crucify this Son, yet also knowing that the Crucifixion of His Son would destroy the power of sin and death.

In God’s “Plan A”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan.  They failed.  Adam and Eve instead brought sin and death into human experience.  Adam and Eve changed a human paradise into a valley of tears, full of suffering, doubt, and at time, even despair.

In God’s “Plan B”, one man and one woman were to begin God’s plan.  These two obeyed.  They fulfilled God the Father’s Will.  And so through there two—Jesus and Mary—you now have the opportunity to live a life here below filled with hope and joy.  Those virtues and all the rest of the virtues will be fulfilled in the perfection of Heaven if we cooperate with God’s grace to the hour of our death.

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Today the Church throughout the world celebrates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Our Blessed Mother is the one creature in all of God’s Creation who obeyed God unfailingly.  Our Blessed Lady is the one human person who has been completely open to accepting Jesus into her life.  God knew that Mary would be such a woman before her life began.  That’s why He gave her a gift at the moment that her mother, St. Anne, conceived her.  God kept Mary from inheriting Original Sin, so that Mary would be the best possible mother for His Son.

We hear of Mary’s faithfulness in today’s Gospel passage.  “Gabriel was sent from God… to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph… and the virgin’s name was Mary.”  She asks how she, a virgin, can conceive.  But God’s messenger assures Mary that God’s Son will be conceived in her womb by the Power of the Holy Spirit.

Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus reflects God’s omnipotence.  God can create something out of nothing.  In the beginning, God created the universe out of nothing.  Similarly, in the nothingness of Mary’s virginity, God creates, and His Son is conceived as a human being in Mary’s womb.  But these two acts of God creating out of nothing—God’s creation of the universe, in the beginning; and God’s creation of Jesus’ human body and soul, in the fullness of time—both foreshadow an even greater miracle on God’s part.

Likely you have heard the saying, “The wood of the crib is the wood of the Cross.”  This saying isn’t literally—historically—true, but its truth lies in pointing out that Jesus’ conception and birth were a means to a greater end:  that end being Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.  As another saying puts it, “Jesus was born into this world, so that he might die from this world.”

Through Mary, God’s Son comes into the world to destroy sin and death.  Jesus’ vocation is fulfilled more than three decades later, according to the same pattern by which God created in the beginning, and in Mary’s womb.  God creates… out of nothing.  So it is with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.  Human sin is a failure to love.  Human sin is an absence of grace, an absence of love.

You and I, as human beings:  how do we respond when someone doesn’t love us?  In our sinfulness, we usually respond in kind.  If someone gives us the cold shoulder, we do the same.  We respond to an absence of love with a further absence of love.  That’s how sin works:  it spreads like a spiritual and moral cancer, destroying the love that God meant, in the beginning, for our human life to be all about.

Thanks be to God, God does not respond to sin as you and I do.  If God did, then when we wandered far from Him, God would have (metaphorically) turned His back on mankind, and left us to wallow in sin, finally to die and exist forever separated from Him.  Thanks be to God, God responds to the nothingness of sin by choosing to love.  Down into the midst of a human race of sinners, God chose to send His only-begotten Son.  On Calvary, in the midst of the nothingness of rejection, rebuke, scourging and mockery, Jesus offered His life for the forgiveness of sin.  In the midst of the nothingness of sin, God “re-deemed” the world.

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Thanks be to God for His act of “re-creation”.  Thanks be to Our Blessed Mother Mary for saying “Yes” to her part in God’s plan.  And thanks be to God for preparing Mary to say “Yes” to His will for her life.  Those are the three truths that the Church celebrates today on this Holy Day of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

First, God from all eternity, knowing that man would reject Him, planned to re-create the human world through the offering of His Son.  Second, God chose Mary to be the Mother of His only-begotten Son, and Mary chose perfectly to accept this vocation.  Third, knowing from all eternity of Mary’s fidelity, God prepared Mary for her vocation be means of a unique grace:  the grace that we call the “Immaculate Conception”, preserving her at the moment of her conception from Original Sin.

This gift was given to Mary not only for her own sake, but for the sake of her Son, and for the sake of all those who would become members of her Son’s Mystical Body, the Church.  You and I celebrate Mary’s fidelity today because she is our Mother.  We honor her as the first and best disciple of Jesus Christ.  We also honor her because of the unique gift of holiness that God gave her through her Immaculate Conception.  During this Season of Advent, Mary’s life shows us best how to receive Jesus into our lives.

Saturday of the First Week of Advent
Isaiah 30:19-21,23-26  +  Matthew 9:35—10:1,5,6-8
December 4, 2021

… they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.

This morning’s Gospel Reading bears imagery that foreshadows Lent, the Sacred Triduum, and Eastertide.  Catholics instinctually understand that Advent prepares Christians for Christmastide, and that Lent prepares them for Eastertide.  Less understood is that Advent and Christmastide, considered as a single block of time, prepares Christians for Lent and Eastertide.

The evangelist tells us that the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd”.  Jesus, of course, is the Good Shepherd [see John 10:11,14].  His noblest act of shepherding took place on Calvary, when He sacrificed His life for His flock.

Jesus’ vocation of Self-sacrifice on Calvary is the chief reason why God the Father sent His Only-Begotten to earth.  It’s important not to lose sight of this during Advent and Christmastide.  God the Father sent His Son to be both shepherd and sheep.  Indeed, He shepherds us by becoming one of the sheep:  by being born as one of us, so that on the Cross He could offer to the Father the sacred humanity He received from the Blessed Virgin Mary.