Advent – Beginning Our Jubilee Year

As the year 2000 approaches, there seems to be a certain amount of apprehension and much anticipation for the new century and the new millennium. For Christians, the apprehension and anticipation is perhaps whether the world at large will respond more fully to the person of Jesus and the wholeness of life that he offers.

This Advent and Christmas are particularly important for us, as followers of Jesus, in order to get our bearings right for the future. Advent means ‘coming’ and in the Advent season we celebrate three different comings of Jesus amongst us.

His first coming is an historical event that took place approximately 2000 years ago and each Christmas celebrates this coming. We marvel at the incredible love God demonstrated for us by allowing Jesus to become one of us in such humility and truly being ‘God with us, Emmanuel’, our ‘God who walks with us’.

The second coming of Jesus will be at the end of time, when the Kingdom of God will be complete. Then Jesus will come in glory and as judge. This is the moment for which the whole of creation waits as the fulfilment of all our desires, when ‘God will be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15: 28).

Jesus as judge will hold no fears for us if we have been accepting of Jesus’ third coming amongst us – in the Word, sacraments, events, people and creation. It is this third coming that should inspire us to respond to God’s love in the here and now. Hopefully the Jubilee spirituality is helping us to respond more deeply to Jesus’ presence in our midst. In his Gospel, St Luke tells us that Jesus began his public life by going to the synagogue at Nazareth where he unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read:

‘The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for He has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.’

St Luke then tells us that Jesus said: ‘This text is being fulfilled today as you listen.’ In other words, the passage from Isaiah is the mission statement of Jesus. Therefore the third coming of Jesus is a reality whenever good news is proclaimed to the poor, when freedom, forgiveness and justice happen. Together with ‘fallow time’, these themes constitute the Jubilee spirituality on which we, as the church, have been concentrating in the past year or so.

Therefore the challenge for us this Advent and Christmas is to develop a way of life that includes:

1. Taking some ‘fallow time’ – for example, a few minutes each day to be still and know that God is with us.
2. Forgiveness – mending the ruptures in our relationships with others and with God. A celebration of Reconciliation can be a great help for this.
3. Freedom – seek out at least one person oppressed by poverty, loneliness or anxiety and be a companion.
4. Justice – right a wrong by taking up a justice issue and being committed to following it through.

If we do the above, Christmas will indeed be happier.

I wish all in the Deanery this happiness and I ask God to bless abundantly all you good people who have contributed this year to helping the church, in Geelong and beyond, to further the mission of Jesus.

   To read PDF files download the Reader from the Adobe web site.
Send web site comments to Webmaster@GeelongCatholics.org   Last modified: December 29, 2006