Advent Reflection: Comforted by God’s Patience

The end of one liturgical year and the start of the next flow very smoothly in the cycle of readings. So smoothly that perhaps without the switch in the vestment colors, lectionary, and breviary the change might be imperceptible. For the last month, all the readings with their prophetic signs and meanings have pointed to Christ’s coming. The end of the liturgical cycle looked to Christ’s second coming when Christ’s dominion over all will be made manifest. However, the Baptist’s cry in today’s first reading marks the culmination of the Old Testament prophecies for Christ’s coming in the flesh. Have we switched what we’re preparing for? Just which coming are we readying ourselves for in Advent? In fact, it is both comings! Advent is a preparation for both the celebration of the solemnity commemorating the Incarnate Word’s birth into the world and His second coming.

Most especially during Advent, the Church reminds us that we are living in a time of ‘already’ and ‘not yet.’ A person might wonder: if Christ has already been born in the flesh; has already offered Himself; has already ascended in glory; why does the world still look so messed up? We can sometimes look at our lives with the same mindset. Christ has already come into my soul through Baptism; has already given me grace upon grace to love Him and grow in virtue; has already given me a taste of heaven. However, I am faaaaar, far from being a saint. Is the world—am I—a hopeless cause? No, have hope! We are caught in between the already and the not yet.

The already begs a question: why should we prepare for Christmas? How do we look forward to a coming that already happened? We human beings are historical by nature and when someone dies his or her earthly life is over. However, Jesus is not dead, but risen and alive! Easter is our key to Christmas. As Jean Corbon in The Wellspring of Worship describes, “the event wherein death was put to death cannot belong to the past, for then death would not have been conquered” (p. 33). Christ in His glorified Body is free from the confines of time. Through His victory over death, Jesus of Nazareth’s life not only has a special place in time, the public beginning of which we celebrate at Christmas, but also over time and outside of time. Because His Sacred Humanity has overcome time and death, His life cannot be a thing of the past. All of Jesus’s earthly life is somehow embedded in His Risen Body. If Christ’s Risen Body has taken up his past, then His infancy, His parables, His healing miracles, His feeding the five thousand, His whole life, most especially His Passion and death by which He saved us, is available to us. None of these events is simply an event of the past but is part of His Risen, a-temporal Body that is still present with us. We can prepare for His coming at Christmas because through the liturgy we can encounter Him in the mystery of His birth.

God has already come and offered the one, true sacrifice and has promised that He is with us always until the end of the age—the not yet. So if we are between the already and not yet, we can take courage because He is with us. We know that Jesus is present when two or more are gathered in His name, in Sacred Scripture, and in the liturgy and sacraments, most especially in the Eucharist. All of these are places for encounter with the risen Body of Christ. In other words, we can ask that the not yet be now. Christ comes to us when we meditate on Scripture, visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament, or ask Him to enter into our hearts in communion.

With this in mind, we can appreciate the second letter of Saint Peter’s reminder that with the Lord “one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day” (2 Pt 3:8). This space between already and not yet is not a “delay” but God’s patience, giving each person time to repent. Since the creation of the world, God was preparing for the day when “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed” (Is 40:5). He wants us to take comfort in His promises, His plans, and His grace. Even if the world or our lives are a mess in the way we see it, we can trust that He is working. His mercy flows between already and not yet in this present moment when we can thank and praise Him for the already and ask Him to bring the not yet closer, to come into our hearts today.