Advent: waiting for God to share our human life

The first words of St. Mark’s Gospel are “The beginning of the Gospel (the good news) of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”  St. Mark’s was the first of four Gospels written, some time after 70 AD, describing the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

“Christ” is Greek and means anointed one, referring to the Hebrew “messiah”  promised in the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, which describes the creation of humankind and its fall from grace through the sinful disobedience of the first humans, Adam and Eve.  St. Mark is making a point here.  Jesus is not only the Messiah, the promised one who would save humankind from its sinfulness, he is God’s only begotten son, the eternal image of the father, the divine proof that God wants to share our life and wants us to share his.  

St. Mark wrote his Gospel from Rome where he had been the assistant and sort of secretary to St. Peter.  Both the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul had been martyred by the Emperor Nero about 10 years prior.  From the first Emperor, Augustus, all Roman emperors bore the title, “Son of God.”  They were considered divine and all in the Roman Empire were to worship them.  St. Mark is saying that Jesus, whom God raised from the dead, and St. Peter and St. Paul and the many Christians who had been martyred along with them for refusing to worship the reigning emperor, were the true victors.  They had joined Jesus, the real and only son of God, in heaven.

Every Advent, like the Jews of the Old Testament, we wait, longing for the coming of God’s Messiah.  Like our biblical forefathers and mothers, we await the one whom the prophet Isaiah called “Emmanuel” (God with us.)  Particularly in this Advent of 2020, we need God’s presence, strength and consolation.  Dying from COVID-19 is not exactly martyrdom, but it is still dying, many alone without the comforting presence of their loved ones.  But our faith is our comfort, for what greater sign of God’s love for us and desire to be with us can there be than the birth of God’s only son in our human flesh.  

Your children will be coming home for Christmas if COVID-19 allows.  But with you or not, you should encourage them to attend Christmas Mass.  Tell them about the comfort and strength that your faith brings you.  The Eucharist is the continuing sign of God’s desire to be with us through this sacrament of Christ’s presence.  It truly is our daily bread for the journey through life, which is now rather precarious.  None of us knows whether we may end up a number on the COVID-19 list before we can get the vaccination.  

Tell your children to get vaccinated as soon as they can.  We all thought that we were invulnerable when we were young.  But this virus is not a danger only to the elderly.  By getting vaccinated, they are also loving their neighbor; they protect not only themselves but others they could infect.  Jesus prayed at the Last Supper that we all might be one.  Only by acting in solidarity can we overcome this modern plague.  

The birth of Christ is proof that God, creator of the universe and of all life within it, loves us enough to share our life through his son, Jesus.  By Jesus’ death and resurrection, God assures us a share in Jesus’ eternal life.  “Father, my disciples are your gift to me.  I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (Last Supper discourse, Jn 17:24-26).  

This all began with Christmas.  We have full reason to believe that even through wars, storms, accidents, pandemics and the certainty of death by old age, God wants us to be with him and his son, Jesus, bound to them and each other in their eternal spirit of love.  

No wonder the angels sang at the birth of the Christ child.  Merry Christmas! 

Father Carville is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].