Another Opportunity!

Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, C.M.I.

Lord Jesus, deliver us from greed and hatred that lead to war and bring us to your peace, justice, healing and blessing. Amen

God has gifted us with yet another new year and blessed us sinners with yet another opportunity for realizing God’s purposes in our lives, in our world. With Advent, everything begins again and the air is filled with eager anticipation of what may lie ahead. With Advent comes a wealth of new possibilities and new chances to make right what was wrong in the now passing year.

We live now in a culture so profoundly secular that Advent is fast becoming a vanishing season. Advent now often seems like a little more than a few-weeks-long shopping prelude to Christmas commercialism. To reinvent the weeks of grace, hope and eager anticipation for God, the church, through the liturgy, calls for a return to the true purpose of Advent: repentance - a repentance that is realized and expressed in transformation.

To guide us in repentance that is both a turning away from sin and a turning toward God, we look today to our mentors in the faith, the prophet Isaiah, the apostle Paul and the evangelist Matthew. Paul (Rom 13:11-14) will call Advent believers to repent of that “Sleepiness” that puts off readiness for Jesus’ coming, thinking that it surely cannot occur in my lifetime or yours. Repent, exhorts Paul, of anything you would not like to be found doing when Jesus finally appears. His words remind us that procrastination can never be an adequate preparation for welcoming the Lord. Similarly, Jesus in today’s Gospel (Mt 24:37-44) invites disciples to be prepared, warning that Jesus’ coming will be sudden, unexpected and decisive.

With words that have yet to be fully appreciated Isaiah (2:1-5) calls for believers to be prepared for the Lord by repenting of war. This repentance must be so deliberate and absolute that even the instruments of war are to be transformed into implements that can help to provide for the hungry poor of this world.

Some may find war a distant and impersonal reality, a mere matter for the evening news or the history books; however, Isaiah’s challenge begs to be applied totally of war’s heinous offspring that surface in our daily lives – violence, aggression, anger, greed, the lust for power and the desire for revenge. Only when we repent of these sins will we be able to follow the heart and mind of the God who has come among us in Jesus. To that end, let us truly repent and redirect ourselves toward the coming Christ.