Second
Sunday of Advent – December 6, 2020
Olympic athletes do
it. Sports teams do it. Airline pilots do it. Professional speakers do it.
Musicians do it. Reasonable people do it. PREPARE.
As Christmas draws
steadily closer, most of us are doing it, preparing. There are cards to be
written, emails to be sent, presents to be bought, food to be purchased. The
experience of preparing is one we are familiar with from many areas of life. We
prepare for trips away from home with masks and sanitizer; we might have to
prepare for a medical exam; students prepare for tests. The wise prepare for
some task or other that have to be done. Some people are very thorough in their
preparations. They leave nothing to chance.
It’s not always fun. In fact, sometimes the preparation hours may seem
long. Imagine an Olympic athletic preparing for years for an event that might
last only seconds. A good outcome begins with good preparation. The time you
spend preparing a project makes for more productive hours at the time when it
counts. Yet, there are some experiences in life we can never fully prepare for.
There is only so much we can do to prepare for the death of a loved one. Even
if that loved one has been ill for a long time, and we think we are prepared
for the moment of death, when it comes, its impact can surprise us. We realize
that there was a quality to the experience of their dying that was impossible
to anticipate, no matter how prepared we were. No marriage preparation course
can prepare people fully for marriage. The relationship of love between a
particular man and a particular woman is too complex and mysterious to be fully
anticipated in advance. I could say the same for the experience of priesthood.
The years of preparation in the seminary can only accomplish so much by way of
making someone ready for what lies ahead. When it comes to the bigger and more
significant experiences of life, the preparing often happens in the doing, or
perhaps after the doing. We look back and learn from some experience, and then,
in the light of that, prepare ourselves better to face the same or similar
experience when it comes around again.
In both the first
reading and the gospel reading for this second Sunday of Advent, we hear the
cry: ‘Prepare a way for the Lord’. How do we prepare
for the coming of one whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are
not our ways? Indeed, when the Lord first came among us as a human being two
thousand years ago, many were not prepared for the way he chose to come. The
Lord’s crucifixion is a reminder to how unprepared people were for his
coming. People did not expect the Messiah to come as a vulnerable infant nor
did they expect a crucified Savior.
Because we can look
back on the Lord’s first coming, we can better prepare the road for his coming to us
now. We have a double task: 1) to rejoice and give thanks that we do not save
ourselves, but that Jesus, the Son of God, is coming to save us; and 2) with
the help of his powerful presence to us, his grace, we can fill in those
potholes, level out those bumps, and remove those road-blocks that are getting
in the way of God’s saving, transforming, changing and renewing us for the
better. We do that by spending time in prayer, reading the Scriptures, our Book
of Life. We meet him in the sacraments of the church. We meet him in the
community of believers who are the Body of Christ. We meet him in the broken
and the needy. In preparing for the Lord’s coming to
us, we are not welcoming a stranger. Our preparing for the Lord’s coming is more like a person preparing for the arrival of a friend
who has shown us how to live and love. The great call of Advent is to receive
the Lord’s daily presence, his daily coming. In the words of the first reading,
‘Here is the Lord coming with power’; he is
coming now, today. Christians should be no less lax than the athlete, the
musician, or the businessman as we go about preparing to celebrate the birth of
Jesus Christ. Come Lord Jesus.
Fr. Don, C.P.