Advent Reflection: The Lord Will Come
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 Second Sunday of Advent
O people of Sion, behold, the Lord will come to save the nations.
V: The Lord will make the glory of his voice heard in the joy of your heart.
God of Hosts, bring us back, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.
Advent is a time of promises. As we move through the great prophetic utterances of the Old Testament at each day’s Mass, we experience hundreds of years of hope in just a few weeks. It is a stirring of the waters, so to speak, but rather than having to drag our broken and weary selves to the font like the paralytic in St. John’s Gospel, it is a fountain built to overflow and come to us.
The Lord will come.
While we are in this season of waiting and travail, which is so sharpened in the silence, how acute does our longing for Jesus become? When all we hear is of wars and rumors of wars, spiritual and temporal, on what can we lean if not this Word?
The Lord will come to save the nations.
He is come and He is coming again. This is no wishful-thinking ‘perhaps’, and these hundreds of years of prophecy are meant to remind us of it so that we may face the waiting with the true virtue of hope. We have so eroded this word – “I hope it doesn’t rain today.” – we forget what it means to hope. Our hope is rooted not in odds, but in Him Whose Word is True. Our hope is sure. It is certain.
Behold. See it. Know it.
The Lord will make the Glory of His Voice heard.
And what will this sound be?
It will be Joy.
In the deepest crevices of our hearts, it will be joy. That is how we will know that it is He Who is come, for His Kingdom advances beyond even the smoke and terror of His Revelation on Mt. Sinai. Into the very center of His creatures, He comes to make His home and to fill it with all the Fullness of Himself. In this, he brings us back to the Zion of His heavenly life and while we wait, it is our faith that makes us partakers of that joy now. We, in turn, cry out for joy and make the Glory of His Voice heard… That Glory which is the radiance of His Face, a radiance so vital it brings with it the true authority of command:
We shall be saved.
Advent is a time of promises, a steady stream of reminders that feeds our faith in Him Who is faithful. We do not wait in vain; we do not even wait in uncertainty. We wait with real knowledge.
The Lord will come.
