Advent Reflection: Rorate Caeli
This year for our Advent reflections, we will focus on the entrance antiphons for each of the Sundays of Advent. These antiphons belong to the Church’s liturgical heritage and are proper to the Mass to which they belong, setting the tone of the liturgical celebration. Even if your parish does not choose to sing them, they can be fruitfully meditated on before or after the Mass.
Entrance Antiphon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent
Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant justum:
aperiatur terra, et germinet Salvatorem.
V: Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei:
et opera manuum ejus annuntiat firmamentuum.
In today’s liturgy for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, preparing us for the immanent celebration of Christmas just days away, the Church presents us with the mystery of the incarnation, beginning with the imagery in the entrance antiphon, which is translated:
Drop down dew from above, you heavens, and let the clouds rain down the Just One; let the earth be opened and bring forth a Savior.
℣ The heavens tell of the glory of God: and the firmament announces the work of his hands.
cf. Isaiah 45:8, Ps. 19:2
The image is one of life-giving water coming down from the heavens and making the earth fertile and fruitful (cf. Is. 55:10-11), so that it bears, not just any fruit, but the fruit of justice and of salvation, and so that it brings forth the Just One who is our Savior.
In all this, the dew and rain fall first from above. The initiative is from heaven. It is God who, in his great love for us, first promised us a savior (as in our first reading), and it is God who saves and justifies us. And yet God does not do these things without our consent and cooperation: the Savior does not simply descend from heaven; rather, he also comes forth from the earth of our humanity, through the consent and child-bearing of the blessed virgin Mary.
When God became man at the incarnation, he united heaven and earth in a wholly unique way: Jesus is both fully God and fully man, united in one divine person, without any change on God’s part and without forming some kind of hybrid not-really-human superman. Christ’s humanity, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), is the instrument of his divinity: “From his fullness we have all received, grace in place of grace” (John 1:16). That is, when God saves us, he saves us through the things Jesus humanly did and suffered, just as 2000 years ago he healed the sick through the human words and gestures of our Lord. Christ’s whole earthly life is fruitful for our salvation (cf. CCC 514-521).
Even as it plays out in our own lives, our salvation and justification are both from heaven and from earth, as it is made fruitful by heaven’s gift. We are saved by our participation in the life of Christ, and this participation comes through the sacraments, which give grace through sensible signs, and through the infused, theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. It is only by God’s action in us that we are saved and justified, yet our cooperation with that action is also necessary. It isn’t the case that the more God is active in someone, the less active that person is, and the more active someone is, the less God is acting in them. God is the cause of all being, of all actuality. To the extent that an action has being, it is wholly caused by God, but that doesn’t prevent it from also from being wholly caused by various created, secondary causes. And so, as we allow grace to permeate our being and direct our actions, the result is not becoming less ourselves, but more. God saves us so that we can be fully alive, fully the kinds of things he made us to be, and so manifest his glory. We do this especially through the human actions of knowing and loving, and in particular through knowing and loving God as he is in himself.
And so, we pray as we eagerly anticipate the joy of Christmas: “Drop down dew from above, you heavens, and let the clouds rain down the Just One; let the earth be opened and bring forth a Savior.”
