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27 nov 2022
27/11/2022 – 1st Sunday in Advent - year A

27/11/2022 – 1st Sunday in Advent - year A

Reading 1 IS 2,1-5 Psalm 121 Reading 2 ROM 13,11-14 Gospel MT 24,37-44

Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths”. Starting a Liturgical Year is like starting the climb up to the Lord’s mountain, on the mountain where you can meet God, the God who has made Himself already present in men’s life. In fact, He has established with them covenants in Order to make Himself known as Father and friend, protector and mentor, just like Jacob’s case. We are setting out to meet Him and welcome His teachings.

We are setting out on those paths we are certain we can find Him on, so on those paths He Himself is showing us through the prophets’ words and, in particular, Jesus’s. We are certain that God’s paths are the best, where our humanity is fully fulfilled, both as individual and as people. In this journey we start over every year, we will live every stop of the wait, the recognition, the listening, the identification and the immersion in His love to receive it and give it. These are the stops of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, all the way through Pentecost and the rest of the time we receive as gift in order to complete our mission. We will live these stops in a new way, enriched by the new experiences which have dotted our life.

We are placed by God in the world for the very reason to change the world, a world always shadowed by wars and fights, violence and injustice which make it a place of fear, suffering and death. This is not the intention God had when He created it, and therefore this is our task, to transform “their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks”, so the peace can embrace the whole earth.

We want to make the effort to follow the Lord’s paths not to reach some personal quietness, but to immerse the world in the Father’s love and the Son’s obedience. We are not deluding ourselves into thinking we can change the whole world, either in little or great ways. We ourselves really struggle to change our resentments into benevolent thoughts, into desire for blessings and prayers for the salvation of those who take up the sword against us. With our love for God and the obedience of the faith, we will be of help to others too so they can be “taken” by the same light and the same love.

Men are distracted by their occupations and material needs and they are not thinking that one day they will leave this world. This forgetfulness makes them superficial and weak, and, even worse, incapable of read the situation, like that man of 99 who was telling me about his hatred for a person who had defrauded him of a metre of land. He did not realise that the hatred was preventing him from enjoying the land he had left and, above all, to reach the bliss of God’s servants when he will need to leave everything.

Saint Paul then is telling us to wake up from our sleep: it is sleep the impossibility to see things and events, beautiful or inconvenient, in God’s light and in the light of the path which should bring us to him. The apostle therefore is urging us to behave in a way to be found “not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy”.

Jesus is our true outfit for storing all our life in: His word and His love is a safer life than worldly pleasures, which are presented to us as legitimate or as our right. They generate fights and quarrels, the Lord’s word instead is harmony, order and brotherly communion.

John the Baptist, with strength and determination, is recommending to everyone a conversion, a change of direction. He is advising this, in particular, to those people who think they are already ok with their conscience and with God: but, who is ever ok with God? Maybe you feel ok with the God you have in your mind, but not with the one who Jesus, the Son, will introduce to us. With the God-love, God the Father, we are never ok. Love always sees new steps to make to get closer to someone suffering, other poverty to make right, emptiness to fill. And John says: «The Kingdom of God is close at hand». It is an attractive piece of news: we take on a new way of living to build this kingdom, nay, to follow the king who comes from the heavens. We want to meet Him and we prepare our heart for it.