Baruch 5:1-9
Psalm 126:1-6
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11
Luke 3:1-6
Notice the intense precision in the Gospel of St. Luke, which gets highlighted prominently during Advent. The physician-turned-evangelist insists very deliberately on the historical truth of the events he reports with a scientific sense of detail. He’s not poetically musing, or abstractly philosophizing, or moralistically mythologizing. St. Luke stands as a personal witness to the reality of the arrival of God’s Messiah-Son.
Like ancient writers normally did, he appeals to well-known authority figures of the day, but to the reader’s surprise, the Divinity doesn’t appear to them. Instead, Christ arrives to the rugged and wild John the Baptist. He comes by St. Joseph, a workaday laborer. He is born of Our Lady, an unwed teenage mother.
He is made manifest among unnamed shepherd boys. Actual scribes and Pharisees got chastised. Poor and sick people specifically were helped and healed. Loved ones were raised from the dead. Bona fide sinners were forgiven. Real-life disciples made quantifiable sacrifices to follow Him.
They all encountered Him in person. Angels and kings come to attend to Him, not the other way around. We number our years by His appearance, and the exploits of secular potentates pale alongside those of His simplest saints, whose accounts endure because they form part of His story.
While this vivid realism is made plain in the Biblical texts, we should recall our place in the ranks of all those personalities by making that Psalmist’s prayerful observation our own: “The Lord has done great things for us.” Baruch is prophesying to Jerusalem, as well as to us, with a very particularized message of hope: “For God will show all the earth your splendor: you will be named by God forever.” Like St. Paul writes to the Philippians, we too have share in a “partnership for the Gospel” and the “good work” begun within us must still be completed.
We could leave all these spiritual exhortations stagnant in their original Scriptural setting, or we could apply them to our personal role in living the Church’s unchanging faith today. In other words, we need to become participants in the activity of grace, not remain sideline spectators.
If a quaint saccharine holiday vibe threatens to infiltrate the spiritual realm and dilute our Catholicity with a vague and anonymous triviality, let us not forget the Advent theme of the Lord’s Second Coming. The epic isn’t over yet. “The day of Christ,” the Last Judgment, is known as “general” only in the sense of “universal.” He promises it will be quite exacting: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” we recite each week, perhaps too blithely.
Only facing that reality somberly will help us prepare properly. If only we took the kind of time and trouble we spend wrapping gifts to unwrap our hearts! What if we adorned our souls like we do our homes? The Scriptures speak repeatedly today of some serious landscape terraforming: “Every lofty mountain be made low” and “age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground.” Hardly minor cosmetic touchups. No stone will be left contentedly unturned in its picturesque little place. That’s what needs to be happening in our souls, in our families, in our parishes, and in our society.
In this, we are offered far more concrete certainty than the testimony of the grand political figureheads and religious hierarchs, like St. Luke points out. It’s good to have good ones, but they all come and go. “The word of God came” in a personalized way for each of us. He alone will return again. It doesn’t get any more real than that.
Are there mystical and mysterious components to the Bible? Certainly. Are the typological patterns and poetic imagery? On every page. Does this mean that we are to understand the wide arc of this sweeping saga as kind of grand fable? Quite to the contrary.
We might sense that tendency to extract some hackneyed practical wisdom from the storylines of Scripture in the manner of a nursery rhyme, then find ourselves leaving the historical narrative aside, skirting around the more unnerving passages, and even entertaining some questions about its veracity. This would be clearly antithetical to the intentions of both the human authors and the Divine Author of Sacred Scripture.
Myths may impart to us useful lessons, but the Word-Made-Flesh who is our Savior Himself desires our life, truly and entirely, personally taking full account of every detail. Hopefully, you can offer Him yours better than ever during this holy season.