“Take up the weapons of the Lord Jesus Christ and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires.” Romans 13: 11-14
“Stay awake! For you do not know when your Lord will come.” Matthew 24: 37-44
Advent was included in the Church’s calendar as a period of reflection intended to engage the Christian in giving attention to the significance of the fact that, in the person of Jesus, God demonstrated unequivocal solidarity and identification with all of humanity. Two words which occur again and again in the prayers and readings of Advent are “Emmanuel” and “incarnation”. Emmanuel is one of the names attributed to Jesus and literally means “God with us”. It first appears in the Bible in the prophesy of Isaiah, who proclaimed how Jesus would be born as a child and take a place in human history. In a prophesy to Ahaz, Isaiah declared: “Watch for this: A girl who is a virgin will become pregnant. She’ll bear a son and name him Immanuel (God-With-Us)” (Isaiah 7:14). We will have to wait till the Fourth Sunday of Advent to hear that reading.
“Incarnation” is a word that is rarely used outside the context of religion. It is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb incarnare, which means “to make/become flesh”. From about the year 1300, the noun incarnation was used quite specifically to mean “the embodiment of God in the person of Jesus Christ” (Chambers, Dictionary of Etymology, p. 517, Harrap Publishers, N.Y. 1988). The word also appears in the flower name carnation, flesh colour. Advent invites us to reflect on the enormity of how God touched humanity in the person of Jesus and how, as a consequence, we are able to encounter Jesus in and through our human experiences. The prominent Catholic theologian and Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius (c.295-375) wrote a treatise on the Incarnation entitled De Incarnatione, in which he stated: “God became like us so that we might become like him.” (sic). The implication of this is that Jesus grew and developed through childhood, adolescence and adulthood like every other male. He asked the kind of questions about his origins and development as everyone one of us has asked. He had to learn how to befriend his body and make his way through the challenges and traumas of adolescence as every other adolescent has. He had to deal with the whole gamut of human emotions within himself and in everyone he encountered. He experienced grief and rejection, loss and acceptance, illness, suffering and the depravity of humiliation, torture and execution of the kind experienced only by a minority. And he died as we all must.
Regrettably, Advent in the world we know has almost become a non-event. The world of retail commerce has already begun selling for Christmas, and Christmas carols can be heard already in shopping malls the world over. For any of us to set aside time for Advent prayer and reflection requires special effort and discipline.
There is an additional irony in some of the readings set down for this First Sunday of Advent. God’s incarnation in human flesh in the person of Jesus not only points to the value and dignity of human flesh and blood – the fact that Jesus adopted our human flesh and blood implies that – but it suggests that this is worth celebrating. In today’s reading from Romans, however, the human body seems to be the object of some severe criticism. The problem we face here is that the Greek word for flesh used in Romans can have two meanings. Sometimes flesh is equated with our sinful nature, while at other times it is used to refer to our human condition, worthy of our reverence and admiration, despite its fragility. The fact that God, in the person of Jesus, has identified in the incarnation with our flesh, in the sense of something to be reverenced, gives us every reason to celebrate. At the same time, we all know the guilt and disappointment we experience when we let bodily urges and desires get out of control, when we fail to treat our bodies with reverence, respect and self-control. But that does not mean that there is something about our bodies of which we should be ashamed or embarrassed. We, with our bodies, talents and emotional life, are gifts from God. It’s important that we stop from time to time to remind ourselves that all of God’s gifts are good, and, as such, worthy of respect and reverence. We also know that gifts can be misused, and today’s reading from Romans is simply a reminder to us to use our gifts for the purpose for which they are intended.
Today’s first reading from Isaiah holds up to us a vision of peace and co-operation among peoples. It’s more than a vision for a a hope-filled future; it’s a vision for a future to the building of which we can contribute by being peace-makers among those beside whom we live, work and minister. While Advent is a time in our Church calendar during which we prepare to celebrate, yet again, the birth of the Christ Child into our midst, we also take time to recall that he had come to usher in an era of peace and a new way of living with one another, a way of living which he called the Kingdom of God.
Isn’t that something of which our world is in desperate need? We all long and hope for warring parties in the Sudan and in Ukraine to settle their differences. We pray for a cessation of the barbarity in Nigeria where innocent girls are being kidnapped and used as bargaining chips. And in Australia we stand horrified at attempts to revive the evils of Nazism and at the violence to which migrants and refugees are being subjected. Happenings like these might lead us to wonder if the Second Coming of Christ is just around the corner.
However, the vision proposed by Isaiah, together with the gospel-reading from Matthew assures us that God has a future in store for us but that it will come in unexpected ways. The event of the birth of Jesus which we are preparing in Advent to celebrate is an assurance that Jesus, the greatest personification we have of God’s love, is already dwelling among us and that we need to keep ourselves awake to that reality. Only our alertness to that reality will help us to realise that every day of our lives provides us with opportunity to participate in making our part of the world all that it can be. – a place where we and our sisters and brothers can live in peace, free from fear and buoyed by hope, confident that Christ will come again to transform all of creation to what it is meant to be.