"Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him..." (Revelation 3:20) A collection of my Sunday homilies for Holy Mass as well as some occasional talks and reflections. May my words enable you to hear the voice of Christ, who asks that you open the door to Him. Please share this podcast with others if you benefit from listening to it.
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The Season of Advent, and the new liturgical year, begin today.
We embark on a journey of preparation for the Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour on December 25th. It is a journey marked by penance and prayer, expectation and anticipation, but also looking backwards to retrace the wonderful and mysterious intervention of God into human history.
Come, Lord Jesus!
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frpchandler@armidale.catholic.org.au
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As I record this on Saturday morning, it's the last day of the liturgical year, and it comes at the end of a week which began for us last Sunday with the great solemnity of Christ, the universal King. Saturday is usually or devoted to our Lady, particularly when there's no other saint, to be honored, so I suggest that we honour our lady on this last day of the liturgical year under her beautiful title of Queen, Queen of Heaven and of Earth. May she keep us safe under her beautiful mantle, within her enfolded arms, and may she always guide us towards her Son Jesus Christ. To be human, but also to be Christian is to have a connection with the past. False is the idea that something new can create be created out of nothing. We live in continuity with our own personal past, and we live in continuity with human history, and we must live in continuity with the honored traditions of our Catholic heritage. Rupture with the past is destructive and harmful. But living this way also imparts its own wisdom. If we look to the past we can not only avoid the errors of the past, but also understand the present, and look with confidence to the future. In the year six hundred and five BC, at the darkest moment of Israel's history, to that point, when the storm clouds of invasion were gathering, and the Babylonian conquest and exile seemed inevitable, Jeremiah was given the prophecy that we hear in today's first reading. The prophecy that the promise made long ago to King David would not fail, even though it seemed impossible to understand how this could be. This was looking backwards to understand the present and the future. The same dynamic is present in the gospel. Saint Luke looks back to the destruction and invasion of Jerusalem by the Romans in seventy AD and presents it as a symbol and foretaste of the final liberation at the second coming of Christ. Again, looking backward to understand the future. The season of Advent has this regular flow between promise and fulfillment, expectation and deliverance, between looking forwards and looking backwards. It always begins not with the first coming of Christ at Bethlehem, but his second coming as judge and king. No one knows how long human history will last before Christ comes again. The Jews to whom Jeremiah was prophesying surely thought the world as they knew it was coming to an end. The horrific destruction of the temple in Jerusalem must have seemed like the end times in seventy AD. There have been other moments of awful horrors at various times of history, right up to our own day. This is the way that God has allowed it to be, since human nature wounded by sin, inflicts wound after wound upon itself, upon nature and upon the world. The catechism teaches us that towards the end of human history, before Christ's second coming, the church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution in this final trial will unveil the mystery of iniquity in the form of a religious deception, offering humanity an apparent solution to their problems, but at the price of a rejection of the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a false Messiah, who will lead mankind to glory itself in place of God and of Jesus Christ who has come in the flesh. Before this final Antichrist, many other and minor antichrists will abound, and in hindsight looking back there have been many of them. Around us today we can see many deceptive Antichrists. These are the promises of happiness that are not based on truth, and therefore not directed towards God. These antichrists can be a person, or an ideology, or riches, or sensuality. We can even vainly attempt to be our own Messiah. In the end, the origin of all these malicious lies will be unveiled. The kingdom will be fulfilled by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, and all of this will cause his bride to come down from heaven. God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the last judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world. Jesus says to us in the gospel, When these things take place stand erect, hold your heads high, because your liberation is near at hand. Why would he say such a thing when we will face those horrible and fearsome events, like the cosmic and earthly calamities, and people dying of fear? One thing we know from other parts of the gospel is that our Lord is not one who uses platitudes, so he really means this. I suggest that one reason we can stand tall and full of hope at the end of this world, at his second coming and the judgment of all humanity, as awful as it will be, is that it will be the victory of his love. Think about it. In his own passion and death he loved in the face of hatred. He loved in the face of death. He put all the bitterness and evil in this world in contact with his love. In doing this he atoned for sin, redeemed the world, and restored the glory due to God the Father from all mankind and all of creation. When he comes again, all the sin, the evil, the treachery and infidelity in the world will be swamped by his love. The immensity of this clash between divine love and sin is cataclysmic, and will disrupt the whole fabric of the cosmos and the world. But divine love will be victorious. So we can endure all of it in supreme confidence because we know the outcome. That doesn't mean we won't be frightened, that we won't be disturbed. However, if we are blameless in the sight of God, as Saint Paul says, ultimately, we will have nothing to fear. Come, Lord Jesus, come.
