Advent Reflection: Be Expectant of God’s Mercy

Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent, Year B

Sometimes God brings us to the bottom. Whatever we do, we find ourselves unfaithful – in our religious lives, in our marriages, in our work, or in our societal commitments. Looking up, we can see nothing but fathoms of defeat.

The bottom can be a scandal: “There but for the Grace of God go I!” sounds like a cruel joke. Even God’s Grace seems to be in question. Is Christ not living in me? Have I left Him on the road somewhere? Despair seems less like a choice and more like an inevitable conclusion.

In the readings for this First Sunday of Advent, the Prophet Isaiah understands the situation:

“There is none who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to cling to you;
for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt.”

Is there anything more final than ‘you have delivered us up to our guilt’? If we are to escape despair, we are forced to confront a question: Why does the Lord allow this?

“Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways,
and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?”

I believe the answer must be: to expose the sickness. Sin is not just a broken rule. Sin is the most corrosive power on earth, almost alive, like cancer is alive, and doing what it does best: destroying us. We see this when we look at the world, when the vote of ‘no confidence’ in our human institutions is reaching yet another a peak. Nuclear powers are at war. A myriad of unpredictable actors are in play. Society is split down the middle and growing violent.

We are helpless.

God desires for us to realise this. To know it, deep down. To acknowledge it, and to stop turning to those things we imagine will fix it. We can no longer turn to vague notions of ‘fraternal feeling’ or ‘market forces’, ‘new year’s resolutions’ or other ‘good intentions’, as the old adage goes. It is not enough; we cannot fix ourselves.

On this First Sunday of Advent, the prophets want us to know this, so that we can finally admit defeat and turn our attention to the only remedy that counts: Our Father’s Mercy.

“Yet, O LORD, you are our father;
we are the clay and you the potter:
we are all the work of your hands.”

Mercy is not a blanket. It does not ‘forget’ in a misty amnesia, or a kindly indulgence. Mercy is a Physician, and a relentless one. Mercy will pursue the cancer to cut it out, to tear sin up at its roots. It will drive it to the bottom and kill it there. Mercy will not cross out our indiscretions like the dishonest steward when it can blot them out, suck the very ink from the page. Mercy will free us, if we let it. Mercy is unwilling to let us be consumed, to hand us over. Mercy is ruthless. Mercy is constant. Mercy is faithful.

The greatest Mercy we can receive is deliverance from our sin.

It is this that the Psalmist cries out for on this First Sunday:

“May your help be with the man of your right hand,
with the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
Then we will no more withdraw from you;
give us new life, and we will call upon your name.

Show us Lord, your love; and grant us your salvation.”

And it is this, Saint Paul reminds us, that will bring us up from the bottom, because Mercy is not just an idea, He is a Person, and He is both coming and already come:

“He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We are asked now, in this season of Advent, not just to commemorate his arrival in a stable at Bethlehem – though God be praised for that! – but to wait for Him anew in our own lives.

At the bottom.

Does this mean that we should lie like a body inert, waiting for the end? By no means! Now is the time for heroic courage – wherever you are, whatever the circumstances – and that courage has a very particular face during the Advent season: it is Hope.

“Watch!” says our Lord to his disciples in today’s gospel, and “Watch!” he says to us. To watch is to remain certain of something on the horizon, to know that the day will come, to understand that Jesus is never too late, and to do whatever He tells you. To watch is to act on the promises He has given, to trust in His commandments, to humble ourselves to live the lives He has asked us to live. Bury yourself in Scripture, learn about your faith from the saints, and the rich tradition of Our Church. Take His counsel and follow it.  

And if, like me, you are sometimes overwhelmed at the thought of fighting on, exhausted, know that it is in that weakness that God wants us to begin, that your weakness is the very thing that will give you power to give everything to Him, to hand over every natural hope for the truest kind of Hope.

Look to His coming.

Watch.