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I’m sure that yesterday around the world the most commonly sung hymn for the First Sunday of Advent was the great Advent Antiphon: O Come O Come Emmanuel.
We know the hymn well, and apart from a couple of awkward pauses between some of the lines which trip us up every year, we sing with confident enthusiasm.
But let’s also consider that this request we make of God: O Come O Come, was not only answered two thousand years ago but is being answered today.
I pray “Come Jesus” and Jesus answers by coming to me.
That is the great shift brought about by the birth of Jesus.
The people of the Old Testament and the common rituals and rites of the other major religions seek to please and appease a God they perceive to be distant, living in far-off heavens, available only to the holy and responding only to the righteous.
But with the incarnation (the birth of Jesus) it’s no longer we who make our way to God but God who comes to us.
Now, in Jesus, God has come to us and is coming to us.
In today’s Gospel a centurion came up to Jesus and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my servant is lying at home paralysed and in great pain.’
Note Jesus’ reply, it’s the thumbs-up given in answer to our Advent O Come O Come prayer. Jesus replies: “I will come myself…”
And that’s the answer Jesus is giving to you today. Yes. I will come myself.
Congratulations on your new appointment Father John. How wonderful for people who feel unwanted or unaccepted in the Catholic Church anymore, or even by Jesus himself, to hear a different voice. He comes to all!
I find this sentence very offensive to those of other faiths, especially Jewish people.
“The people of the Old Testament and the common rituals and rites of the other major religions seek to please and appease a God they perceive to be distant, living in far-off heavens, available only to the holy and responding only to the righteous.”
Jesus got his understanding of a loving God, who keeps reaching out to us, from his Jewish background.