Homily for First Sunday of Advent
Advent is a strange season. That strangeness is dramatically highlighted in today's Mass. We find, side by side, readings of consolation, and readings of apparent doom. In our first reading from Jeremiah, the Judean exiles are sustained with this divine promise: "In those days I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice in the land. Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety." That branch was to spring from the root of Jesse. This is addressed to the Jewish people who had been carried into exile in Babylon. They have been in exile now for over one hundred and fifty years, or for at least six generation. So the actual memory of their own land has now passed from the nation entirely.
It is the challenge of the prophet to rekindle that memory. And he does this through the prophetic promise: God, through the lips of the prophet, reminds his people of their roots, and promises them that he will bring them back to their own land. Judah will not disappear from their memory; Judah will be saved and, moreover, Jerusalem will be their secure capital once more. The dead past is revived so that a new future may be created. This text is enough to lift the heart and fire the patriotism of any exiled Jew. It is a text of sure hope and enormous promise.
In our gospel text from Luke, Jesus speaks of the world approaching its catastrophic, volcanic end; the inhabitants will faint from fear and foreboding, he says. You would need to have a strange sense of yourself and your world to derive any joy or hope from that reading. So, woven into our Advent liturgy are texts of terror and texts of promise, instilling fear and hope in equal measure. I'm sure as you listened to that gospel reading, most of you will have sensed that it is decidedly at odds with the cultural optimism of the secular Christmas. For example, there is little chance of you walking into your local supermarket and hearing that gospel passage set to seasonal music. Advent then is a season of stress, in season in which very different texts and sentiments contend for ascendancy. Advent is a season under stress, as one writer put it.
In the course of the 5th century the Roman Empire disintegrated. With the collapse of Rome, the hub fell off the wheel and all the spokes went their separate ways, unconnected and unrelated to each other. This of course had serious consequences for the church and its liturgy. In effect, several local, independent Churches began to emerge. Gaul began to pick up where Rome left off, as the leading Church of the western world. The Church of Gaul, now in the driving seat, becomes notoriously conservative. They hold fast to the conviction of the first generation of Christians are the last, the world will end with them: that the end of the world was at hand. The collapse of the Roman Empire galvanised this conviction. These two aspects of our modern Advent liturgy have their origins in two separate and very different traditions: the texts of terror, relating to the end of the world, have their origins in 4th century Gaul, or France. There Advent did not exist. Instead for the last three Sundays of the year the people of Gaul gathered in their churches to mark the progress of the world towards its end. There they listened to the scriptures prophesying the end of the world. They would have prepared for this through fasting and abstinence. The New Year for them would begin with the birth of Christ on Christmas Day. But they made no connection at all between the end and the beginning. They celebrated the end of the year, and they began anew on Christmas day.
But in Rome a different tradition evolved independently. In Rome the Christians were reconciled more quickly to the fact that the end was not immanent, that the end was postponed indefinitely. By the 5th century the focus rested securely on the first coming of Christ, on his birthday. There the people assembled to commemorate and celebrate this event. Feast, rather than fast was the order of the day. They too, like their friends in Gaul, assembled in their churches. But there the Roman Christians had the Old Testament texts of promise read to them. The emphasis here was on celebration and thanksgiving.
In the sixth century, an attempt was made to harmonise the very different celebrations, to impose when some universal uniformity on the liturgical calendar. In this harmonisation, both elements were retained, the texts of terror cheek by jowl with the texts of promise.
In recent times, in secular society at any rate, the stress has fallen decidedly on the celebration aspect of the season. If you fail to smile throughout the entire season, there is a danger of you being committed to an institution for the bewildered. There is a contrived euphoria abroad, a manufactured, shallow sentimentality that is as inflated and as substantial as the balloons that announce it. But this was not always so in the Irish tradition. Some of you may even remember when Advent was marked in the same way as Lent. Patrick Kavanagh in well-know poem, Advent, captures this custom:
We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the advent-darkened room
Where the dry bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
As I said already, unrelieved happiness and celebration seems to dominate our present celebration of Christmas. But we know from experience that unrelieved happiness and celebration is false. It does not conform to life as we know it. It clouds over the fragility of life. Perhaps this is the function of the texts of terror: they ground our celebrations in reality. We have not here a lasting city.