Today’s readings: Isaiah 2, 1-5; Romans 13, 11-14; Matthew 24, 37-44.

For those who still believe in what the Christmas story stands for, it is an ongoing struggle and challenge year after year not to let the story sink to the rank of a fable. Honestly, it has all the features, and we give it the right wrapping, to be a fable. Hopefully though, Advent should help us unpack the story so that it may more credibly connect with our emotions, anxieties, and turmoils today.

Our demythologised culture seems to have come of age to an extent that this Bethlehem narrative hardly stimulates even the fantasy and imagination of children, let alone those of us adults seasoned in the hard talk of daily experience. Advent is a time when talk about ‘salvation’ resurfaces, it is the opportune time to confront ourselves with the provoking questions that pertain to those aspects of our living that are of ultimate importance and that cannot be ignored.

Do we need a saviour? What do we need to be saved from? Can we still hope for a salvation that can transform our world into a more humane environment? Can things change, or should we resign ourselves passively and helplessly to things as they are unfolding?

Talk about saving the world and ourselves can have many facets, all linked one to the other, be it about climate change or healthy living or about living meaningfully. We are facing very serious threats nowadays and time is running out.

Isaiah’s invitation in the first reading is very remarkable: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, that He may teach us His ways so that we may walk in His paths.” The prophet is addressing a people who had forgotten God’s ways and who had embarked on paths that eventually led the people astray. So they needed to shift perspective, to change standpoint, symbolically by going up to the mountain of the Lord.

Isaiah’s call, like that of Jesus in the gospel, is against alienation, against the clear and ever present danger in life to simply be overwhelmed by what comes across without having the time, the wisdom, the strength to react or to respond. We tend so easily to block ourselves in the daily valleys of life, not having the opportunity to look on life from other perspectives.

We need to unblock ourselves, to climb the mountain, and again let God “teach us His ways”.

True, we live in times when the great scenario of reconciliation recalled by Isaiah, in which peoples and nations will decide for disarmament and peace, is still on hold. It sounds for us too head in air and romantic. It tastes of fables, far-fetched from the hard reality.

The gospel recalls Noah’s story as a call to stay awake, to be ready and alert to realities that the world around us is doing nothing about. One can ignore such provocations and pretend not to be disturbed at all by what is denying so many people their freedom and dignity, and by what is even hindering us from living fully and meaningfully, or by what is constantly distorting all that we would desire to live authentically.

The Lord’s voice remains always unsettling in this sense. And while we remain free to shut it out, we would indeed do well to let it disturb our peace. This can be a very opportune time. “The time” has come, writes St Paul in the second reading. Matthew’s gospel also speaks of an ‘unknown’ day “when your master is coming”.

This is not a threat. It is not at all meant to make us feel haunted by some sudden reckoning that would take us unawares. It is the good time, the opportunity not to evade or elude our crises but to let them re-mould us as mature and wise people. Noah’s day recalled in the gospel can point to our flattened lives, the daily routine that kills, opposed to the rhythm that instead can rekindle in us the true desire to live without losing the alertness never to be taken unawares.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.