This Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Our society has different ways of calculating the timespan of a year. The civic calendar goes from January 1 to December 31. Schools follow the academic calendar, which begins late summer or early autumn and lasts until the spring. The fiscal year starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. A number of ethnic groups also maintain their own traditional calendars.
In the Catholic Church, our calendar is the liturgical year. We start on the First Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. Andrew, observed on November 30. We then follow a sequence of seasons and feasts throughout the year, until the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.
Each day of the Church year has its own specific readings and prayers. To cover more of the Bible, the Church alternates the text of the readings from year to year. For daily Mass, we use a two-year cycle, alternating between Year I and Year II. For the readings for Sundays and major feasts, we use a three-year cycle, Cycle A, B, and C. Each cycle focuses on a different Gospel. Cycle A is dedicated mostly to the Gospel of Matthew, while Cycles B and C take their readings, for the most part, from the Gospels of Mark and Luke respectively. This Sunday, we are entering into Cycle A, so the Sunday Gospel readings for this coming liturgical year will primarily be drawn from the Gospel of Matthew.
The liturgical year is a wonderful gift of the Church to the faithful, which shapes our day to day lives and helps us to enter into the mysteries of our faith more deeply. On the one hand, every Mass celebrates the fullness of our faith. On the other hand, the different feasts and seasons focus us more intensely on various aspects of our faith, helping us to contemplate them more deeply. The liturgical year forms us and educates us.
The rhythm of the Church year also shapes our sense of time. Historically, Catholics and other Christians too conceptualized life in terms of the ongoing sequence of the liturgical feasts and seasons, rather than according to the timeframe of a secular calendar. I am reminded of my dear Aunt Gizella, who passed away at the age of 90. She would say things like, "Will you be done with that project by Pentecost?" using the traditional feasts as her markers for the progression of the year.
As mentioned above, the start of Advent is the beginning of the Church calendar. The season of Advent goes from the Sunday nearest the Feast of St. Andrew on November 30 until we begin the celebration of Christmas on Christmas Eve. Thus, depending on the exact start date, the Advent season can be three to four weeks long, but always encompassing four Sundays. But what is Advent about? Throughout the Advent season, we prepare for the celebration of Christmas, the coming of Christ, who is God Incarnate, among us for the transformation of the world. As we begin the liturgical year, we also prepare for the end - the end of the world, the Second Coming of Christ, when he will remake the world, bringing forth the New Jerusalem.
The first Christmas was a pivotal moment in the history of the world. God had created a perfect world for humanity to enjoy eternally. But through our sin, we marred God's creation and put a chasm between us and God, plunging ourselves into darkness. But God did not leave us alone in our brokenness. He came among us as one of us, taking on our human nature. He then offered himself up for us upon the Cross to cleanse us of our sins.
By accepting Christ's gift of salvation, we can return to our original blessedness. But the gift is even greater than that. By becoming one of us, the Creator established the closest possible union between himself and his creation. By entering into communion with Christ through baptism and the life of the Church, we enter into the closest, most intimate possible union with God. That is the beautiful message of Christmas. To prepare ourselves for Christmas, let us reflect on how we can open our lives to welcome Christ fully. God gave himself to us fully. Let us reciprocate his love by holding nothing back as we offer ourselves to him, putting on Christ as the Apostle Paul says in the Second Reading for this Sunday.
St. Paul also pulls no punches as he urges us to stay away from sinful conduct, since all sin separates us from Christ. "Let us then" he says, "throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh." Here St. Paul used a technique called leveling, which entails a list where items of seemingly dissimilar significance are grouped together. He starts with obviously weighty sins - orgies, drunkenness, promiscuity, and lust. Then he switches to sin some would consider less significant - rivalry and jealousy. Through the leveling technique, St. Paul indicates that our concern should not be with just the spectacularly terrible sins, but with all sin. The sins we might deem less damaging can also cause a great deal of harm. We need to avoid all sin in order to be able to put on Christ, as the Apostle says.
We should note also that "flesh" here, as in some other passages in the New Testament, does not equate to the body, but signifies anything that draws us away from Christ, whether material or spiritual. Our lives should, as St. Paul proclaims in all of his writings, be completely Christocentric. Christ should not be just a part of our lives, however important a part. Christ should be the absolute center and organizing principle of all facets of our existence. That is what we should strive for during this Advent season as we prepare for Christmas.
Having Christ as our center is how we prepare for the end of the world as well. As Christians, the contemplation of the end times should give us hope, not fear. Our faith tells us that the end of the world, when it comes, will happen upon the return of Christ, when he will transform all of creation. The current order will dissolve and a whole new way of being will begin.
In the Gospel Reading for this Sunday, as in many other passages, Christ tells us to be ready. Though the warning seems dire, what we are to be ready for is his return. If we make him the center of our lives, if we live our lives for him in the here and now, then we will be received into the new reality he will bring about. He will remake the world into a new, heavenly order of complete blessedness, entirely ruled by and centered around his unending, infinite love. That is what we anticipate and long for during the Advent season.
However, keeping Advent a season of preparation is challenging in our culture, which starts to celebrate Christmas (usually in a commercialized and de-Christianized manner) right after Thanksgiving or even already after Halloween. It is beyond the scope of this reflection to offer detailed suggestions for how to enter into the true character of the Advent season, but if you would like to read more, please see my article https://www.zoltanabraham.com/p/reclaiming-advent.html, which offers an in-depth exploration of the season from a Catholic perspective.
In closing, I will highlight just one specific Advent tradition, the Christmas Anticipation Prayer, which has traditionally been prayed 15 times a day from November 30 to Christmas Eve. Let us offer this prayer in the coming weeks for the grace of being fully open to welcoming Christ’s grace into our lives.
"Hail and blessed be the hour and moment, in which the Son of God was born of the most pure Virgin Mary, at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold. In that hour vouchsafe, O my God, to hear my prayer and grant my desires [here mention your request], through the merits of Our Savior Jesus Christ, and of his blessed Mother. Amen."
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The readings for the Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C, are:
Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122: 1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:37-44
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Advent wreath: Week #1 by Eugenio Hansen, OFS from Wikimedia Commons.
