Isaiah 16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7. Psalm 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-10. 1 Corinthians 1:3-9. Mark 13:33-37.
I doubt any of us sang “Auld Lang Syne” as the clock struck midnight, but, for the Church, this is New Year’s Day. With the Season of Advent, a new liturgical year begins in a spirit of quiet anticipation. We look toward the celebration of our vulnerable God’s birth into the world of creatureliness. We look further ahead to the consummation of the Universe in the life of the Holy Trinity at the end of time. But we also look toward our own future on this earth as persons, as the Church, and as members of the many other, sometimes overlapping, communities to which we belong.
The past liturgical year has not been easy. Though the coronavirus pandemic has officially been over for some time, the illness continues to take a toll, and has left us all, probably, with a newly-urgent sense of our mortality. Deadly conflict rages in Ukraine and the Holy Land, overshadowing in the headlines without diminishing the reality of ongoing strife elsewhere in the world. Here in the wealthiest nation on the globe, the scourge of homelessness continues to expand, while minority communities face increasingly blunt expressions of intolerance (even, sometimes, from one-another) and a renewed sense, among a surprising number of Americans, that intimidation and violence are appropriate expressions of their convictions, while discriminatory legislation advances in a number of states (as, indeed, elsewhere in the world, sometimes in life-threatening ways). Personally, this past year, I have lost to illness and advancing age an unprecedented number of people who were, or were once, close to me.
Today’s reading from the Book of Isaiah reminds us of the essential thing. We must not “harden our hearts,” and hardness of hearts can take many forms, from habitual wrong-doing that, once routinized (or once we become dependent on its results) blinds us to its wrongness; to allowing our spiritual and psychological fortifications (entirely appropriate in a world that can wound) to become such bastions as to close us off from love given or received; to, frankly, wanting to give up on making a difference in the world from a sheer sense of its overwhelming problems.
Just as, in the Incarnation we anticipate this season, God opened God’s own life to us by becoming one of us, so we must open ourselves to God and the invitation to love that he is always so urgently extending.
The imagery of encounter from today’s reading from Isaiah, in which the Prophet invites God to “meet us in doing good,” is echoed in the collect from today’s Mass, asking God for “the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming.” This imagery, like the Gospel, is hopeful and optimistic about what, with God, each of us can do in love. We can change our lives for the better; we can be of service to the needs of our neighbor. What we do with an in God may seem small, but, joined with the work of many others of good will, and with that of all the angels and saints, the good is cumulative. As Advent takes us into winter, let us sprint through these cold days and nights toward the warm embrace of the Lord, who runs toward an encounter with us, too.