Dear
Brothers and Sisters,
With these vespers we begin the itinerary of a new liturgical
year, entering into the first of the seasons that constitute
that year: Advent. In the biblical reading that we just heard,
taken from the First Letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle
Paul uses precisely this word: "coming," which in Greek is "parousia"
and in Latin, "adventus" (1 Thessalonians 5:23). According to
the common translation of this text, Paul exhorts the Christians
of Thessalonica to keep themselves irreprehensible "for" the
coming of the Lord. But in the original text we read "in" the
coming ("en te parousia"), as if the coming of the Lord were,
more than a future event, a spiritual place in which we already
walk in the present, during the wait, and in which we are
perfectly vigilant in every personal dimension. In effect, this
is exactly what we live in the liturgy: celebrating the
liturgical seasons, we actualize the mystery -- in this case the
coming of the Lord -- in such a way as to be able, so to speak,
to "walk in it" toward its full realization, at the end of time,
but already drawing sanctifying virtue from it from the moment
that the last times have already begun with the death and
resurrection of Christ.
The word that sums up this particular state in which we await
something that is supposed to manifest itself but which we also
already have a glimpse and foretaste of, is "hope." Advent is
the spiritual season of hope par excellence, and in this season
the whole Church is called to be hope, for itself and for the
world. The whole spiritual organism of the mystical body
assumes, as it were, the "color" of hope. The whole people of
God begins the journey, drawn by this mystery: that our God is
"the God who comes" and who calls us to come to meet him. In
what way? Above all in that universal form of hope and
expectation that is prayer, which finds its eminent expression
in the Psalms, human words by which God himself has placed and
continually places the invocation of his coming on the lips and
hearts of believers. Let us pause for a moment, then, on the two
Psalms that we prayed a short while ago and that follow each
other in the biblical text itself: 141 and 142, according to the
Hebrew numbering.
"O Lord, I cry to you, hasten to help me; / give ear to my voice
when I cry to you. / Let my prayer rise up to you as incense, /
the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice" (Psalm
141:1-2). This is how the first Psalm of first vespers of the
First Week of the Psalter begins: words that at the beginning of
Advent acquire a new "color" because the Holy Spirit always
makes them sound in a new way in us, in the Church on its way
between the time of God and the time of men. "Lord ... hasten to
help me" (141:1). It is the cry of a person who feels himself to
be in grave danger, but it is also the cry of the Church in the
midst of the many snares that surround her, that threaten her
holiness, that irreprehensible integrity of which the Apostle
Paul speaks, that must be maintained for the coming of the Lord.
And in this invocation there also resounds the cry of all the
just, of all those who want to resist evil, the seductions of an
iniquitous well-being, of pleasures that are offensive to human
dignity and the condition of the poor. At the beginning of
Advent the Church's liturgy again cries out with these words and
addresses them to God "as incense" (141:2). In the Church
material sacrifices are no longer offered as they were in the
temple of Jerusalem. Instead the spiritual offering of prayer is
lifted up, in union with Christ's, who is both sacrifice and
priest of the new and eternal covenant. In the cry of the
mystical body we recognize the very voice of the Head: the Son
of God who took our trials and temptations upon himself to give
us the grace of his victory.
This identification of Christ with the Psalmist is particularly
evident in the next Psalm, Psalm 142. Here every word, every
invocation makes us think of Jesus in the passion; in particular
we think of his prayer to the Father in Gethsemane. In his first
coming, in the incarnation, the Son of God wanted fully to share
our human condition. Naturally, he did not share in sin, but for
our salvation he suffered its consequences. Every time she prays
Psalm 142 the Church experiences again the grace of this
com-passion, this "coming" of the Son of God into human anguish,
his descent into its deepest depths. Advent's cry of hope
expresses, then, from the beginning and in the most forceful
way, the whole gravity of our condition, our extreme need of
salvation. It says: We await the Lord's coming not like a
beautiful decoration added to an already saved world but as the
only way to freedom from mortal danger. And we know that he
himself, the Liberator, had to suffer and die to bring us out of
this prison (cf. 142:8).
In sum, these two Psalms protect us against any temptation of
evasion and flight from reality; they preserve us from a false
hope, one that would like to enter into Advent and set off for
Christmas forgetting the dramatic nature of our personal and
collective existence. In effect, it is a trustworthy hope, not
deceptive, it cannot but be an "Easter" hope, as we are reminded
every Saturday evening by the canticle from the Letter to the
Philippians, with which we praise Christ incarnate, crucified,
risen and universal Lord. We turn our gaze and heart to him, in
spiritual union with the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Advent. Let us
place our hand in hers and enter with joy into this new season
of grace that God grants his Church for the good of the whole of
humanity. Like Mary and with her maternal assistance, let us
make ourselves docile to the action of the Holy Spirit, so that
the God of Peace might completely sanctify us, and the Church
might become a sign and an instrument of hope for all men.
Amen!
[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]
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