advent and christmas
The Advent. Meaning and content.
Advent is the liturgical season in which the Church prepares us for the arrival of the Lord. It begins four Sundays before December 25 and constitutes the beginning of the liturgical year.
Advent means coming. The coming of Christ to the world takes place in a triple plan:
PAST: historical coming to Palestine,
PRESENT: sacramental coming, today,
FUTURE: glorious coming at the end of the world.
Christ is coming today and here, to us, within us. He is making us corporeal with him, in solidarity with his person and with his redemptive mystery. Through the gift of his word and of the Eucharist, Christ imprints himself on us. He makes us his body. His glorious coming at the end of time will be nothing other than the revelation of the comings that he now performs in us. There is real continuity between his actual coming and his glorious coming. Exactly as the seed extends into the fruit. This is the greatest truth of faith. Whoever wants to meet the living Christ must penetrate the mystery of his presence through the liturgy. It is necessary that the Christian has an interior look. Advent is radically closeness and presence of the Lord.
The great witnesses of Advent
There are three: The prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary.
Isaiah announces what the coming Messiah will be like. Shake the conscience of the people to create in them an attitude of waiting. It demands purity of heart.
John the Baptist points out who the Messiah is, who has already come. He himself is a model of austerity and ardent expectation.
Mary is the key figure of Advent. Israel’s wait culminates in it. She is the most faithful host of the word made flesh. She receives it in her womb and in her heart. She lent him her life and her blood. Mary is Jesus begun. She made the first Christmas possible and is the model and channel for all the comings of God to men. Mary, because of her fidelity, is type and mother of the Church.
The fundamental attitudes of Advent
1. Waiting attitude. The world needs God. Humanity is disenchanted and helpless. Modern aspirations for peace and happiness, for unity, for community, are the ground prepared for the good news. Advent helps us to better understand the human heart and its insatiable drive for happiness.
2. The return to God. The experience of frustration, of contingency, of ambiguity, of captivity, of loss of external and internal freedom of men today, can arouse the thirst for God, and the need to “go up to Jerusalem” as a dwelling place for God, according to the psalms of this time. Infidelity to God destroys the people. His fidelity makes his true history and identity. Advent helps us to know God better and his love for the world. He gives us inner knowledge of Christ, who being rich for us becomes poor.
3. The conversion. With Christ, the kingdom is near within us. The voice of the Baptist is the cry of Advent: «Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths; let the valleys rise, let the mountains and hills descend; let the crooked be straightened, the rough be equalized. And all will see the salvation of God … » (Is 40,3-5). Advent teaches us to make ourselves present in the history of the salvation of environments, to understand love as a way out of ourselves and full solidarity with those who suffer.
4. Jesus is the Messiah. He will be the liberator of the whole man. He will fight against all evil and will defeat it not by violence, but by way of a victimization of love. Salvation passes through a personal encounter with Christ.
5. Joy and happiness. The kingdom of Christ is not only something social and external, but interior and deep. The coming of the Messiah constitutes the announcement of great joy for the people, of a joy that moves even the heavens when the sinner repents. Advent teaches us to know that Christ, and his Easter, is the sure and definitive feast of the new humanity.
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