First Sunday of Advent
ISAIAH 2:1-5
The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem:
In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.”
He will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths.
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
Isaiah is one of those geniuses who appear from time to time in the history of humanity. He lived in Jerusalem around the year 750. They were terrible years for the kingdom of Judah. From the Northeast, the formidable Assyrian empire was a terrible threat to Syria, Israel, and Judah. The Assyrians destroyed everything; they were bloodthirsty warriors.
But worse still, Isaiah saw that the people and their kings were not faithful to the Lord, they did not obey the Law… and he feared that they would be destroyed as punishment for their infidelity.
In the midst of so much anguish, Isaiah nevertheless had the courage to announce to the people that if they were faithful to the Lord, the end would be triumph, the triumph of the Lord: Jerusalem would be restored, the Lord would be venerated in his holy temple, and the people would be “The Holy People,” “The People of God,” who would be a light to the nations.
The Church has understood these words of Isaiah as a prophetic vision of the definitive triumph of God.
In the end, God reigning over all things. But it is not an external kingdom, a burst of power. Nor is it a political triumph of Israel, although the people of Israel sometimes believed it to be so. It is about God reigning in human hearts, instructed in his ways. Humans will walk according to the will of God. This will bring peace. It is a summary of history: humans walk in darkness, walk in sin; the day will come when they turn to the light.
The image is the Mountain. For every reader of the Bible, the Mountain, the Mountain of Mountains is Sinai, because on that mountain the Liberating God gave men the Law, the law that is to save them from sin. But the mountain is also Mount Zion, Jerusalem. History unfolds from mountain to mountain: from Sinai, where God offers man the Law, so that by fulfilling it he will not be a slave to sin; to Mount Zion, when humanity finds God and his Kingdom is realized.
It is a vision of the end times, in a positive sense, not as destruction and catastrophe but as culmination, fullness: “God will be all in all,” “all peoples will walk in his light.” We often insist on the end as catastrophe, but the Bible is full of images of the final triumph of God, of the fullness of humanity that finally finds the light of God.
ROMANS 13:11-14
Be aware of the time in which you live; it is already the hour to wake up from sleep, because now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far gone, the day is near: let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Paul writes this letter probably from Corinth around the years 57-58. He considers his task in Asia and Eastern Europe finished and is heading towards Rome and the West, with the intention of reaching, perhaps, as far as Spain.
He has already written several letters that we know: to the Thessalonians, the Corinthians, the Galatians, perhaps also to the Philippians.
Rome already has an important Christian community; we do not know who founded it, although it is likely that they were Jews living in Rome who came into contact with the Gospel on their pilgrimages to Jerusalem. The city of Rome, capital of the Empire and great City, exerts a huge attraction on Christians. When Jerusalem disappears, in the year 70, Rome will share with Antioch and Alexandria a kind of “honorary primacy” among the various churches and will certainly be the head of the Churches of the West.
We do not know very well what was the reason for the letter, which is a great doctrinal document that could have been sent to any Christian community.
Let us slowly reread today’s text: “Be aware of the time in which you live.” “The night is far gone, the day is near.” Paul does not share the idea of many early Christians, who thought that the end of times was imminent. We know this from the letters to the Thessalonians, which we read at the end of Cycle C. But, in any case, that interpretation is not of interest to us. It doesn’t matter to us when the world will end. We can even say that it doesn’t matter to us when our life will end. What matters to us is that it will end.
In this text, there is a very beautiful version of the end. The end is not moving from light to darkness, but the opposite; the end is that the night ends and the day arrives. Beautiful: this life is the night: the death of each one – and perhaps the end of this universe – is the dawn, the arrival of the day, of the light, which is God. This changes all values. Everything we desire has a very relative value, because it ends. But life does not end. So, why do we live? How should we live?
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.