A Homily for the First Sunday of Advent

​+ Levate capita vestra: quoniam appropinquat redemptio vestra! “Lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!” If there is a simple and straightforward message for each of us on every increasingly poignant day of Advent, it is this: Raise your head! Redemption is coming!
 
And how we need to hear this cry! For we spend day after day with our heads down, buried in our own preoccupations and plans, burdened by our imperfections, soiled by our sins, absorbed in our self-will, weighed down by illness and suffering, concerned by the inadequacies of others, fretting about our future, anxious about our material survival, etc. Life in this world is full of worries. Even those who enter the cloister or who seek to serve the Church in active ministry do not escape such stress—particularly when ecclesiastical authorities lack integrity and themselves become the purveyors of injustice and persecution—bishops can be sacked or marginalised, even Cardinals can be rendered unemployed and homeless at a whim it seems!
 
It is natural enough to focus on ourselves and our needs and our ambitions: we must survive in a material world and in the Church as it is. We must think about and plan for the future. And if our vocation gives us responsibility for others, we must attend to the exigent duty duly to provide for their needs, as any parent knows only too well.
 
But this beautiful season of Advent reminds us that so too must we lift up our heads in joyful hope and in profound trust, for something—someone!—greater than all our concerns is at hand: our Redeemer, Jesus, the Christ of God, born of a humble Virgin in Nazareth, God-made-man for our Salvation. And His coming, His Incarnation, shall both inform and transform us. It shall give us a supernatural perspective and the grace with which to deal with all our burdens and worries and indeed to put them into a perspective in which they no longer dominate us and crush the life out of us—as the lives of the saints, and most particularly the lives of the martyrs, teach us.  
 
If we persevere, if we continue to lift up our heads and encounter His loving and saving gaze and persevere in living in the light that radiates from His Holy Face, we shall become that man or woman whom He calls us to be—and thereby find the salvation of our souls and be able to do much good for the salvation of others.
 
Whereas, if we look down again—or worse, if we look (or walk) away from our Redeemer and all that He asks of us—we shall find ourselves back in the descending spiral of ego-centric self-will that leads further and further away from Christ and the Redemption He brings. We shall be at risk of that eternal hell where all I have is the narrow and selfish path that I have chosen, despite all that Almighty God has done for me and has called me to discover and become in His service.
 
St Paul knew this only too well, which is why He addressed the Romans (and why the Church addresses us through her Sacred Liturgy this morning) with this clear exhortation:
 
“You know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed;  the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”
 
It may come as a surprise for our contemporaries to learn that Advent is not a time for drunkenness and gratifying the desires of the flesh, but so be it. It is not. This is the season where in each of us the works of darkness must cede their place to all that is of the light. It is the season where the coming of our Redeemer demands that further conversion of ourselves, of our wills, of our desires, of our motivations, of our lives that is necessary in each of us.
 
Traditionally, of course, we do this by making a good, integral sacramental confession during the season of Advent—let us not neglect so to do. So too we do this by putting on the armour of the ascetic disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, chastising our desires and positively giving of ourselves out of love of God and of our neighbour in anticipation of the coming feast of all that Almighty God has given to us.  
 
Levate capita vestra: quoniam appropinquat redemptio vestra ! “Raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near!” No matter what weighs us down, no matter what burdens us, these words call us in this holy season of Advent to look up—just as we look up and adore the Sacred Host and Blessed Chalice in every Mass—and to become caught up anew in the sight of our Redeemer. For then, in the loving embrace of His gaze, we shall find that redemption which shall calm our fears and enable us to become the person He calls us to be. +