AdventCA Season of Expectation
St. Philip Neri Church, Waban, MA, 1st Sunday of Advent (B), November 28, 1993
Many years before Christ, a debate was going on among Greek philosophers. The debate centred on this question: what is time? It is a question we might take to be rather simple. It might seem to us to be an idle debate. But for these Greek philosophers it was something to talk about. Aristotle had argued that time can neither begin to be nor cease to be. In other words, time does not exist. And if time does not exist there is no way of speaking of a Abefore@ or an Aafter@. Plotinus, a disciple of Plato, remarked that we think we know what time is. But when we begin to think about it in depth then it dawns on us that in fact we do not know what time is. This question would be taken up later by a Christian writer, St. Augustine.
In the eleventh book of his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo made some interesting remarks about time, remarks similar to what Plotinus the Greek philosopher had said. In our familiar everyday conversation, Augustine observed, we speak about time. When we speak of time we know what we are talking about. But if someone were to ask us: what time is we would find ourselves in the awkward situation of not knowing how to explain what it is. What then is time? Is it the past, the present, or the future? In his discussion on time, St. Augustine considers the two tenses: past and future. The past is not now present; therefore there is no past. As for future, the future is not yet present, therefore there is no future. So there is neither past nor future. But how about the present? The present is itself illusory. It is such that before we even utter the word Apresent@ the moment which we want to call present is already gone. So, there is no present. AWhat is by now evident and clear@ concludes St. Augustine, Ais that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three timesCpast, present, and future. Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expectation@ (Confessions xi, 25). Augustine finally gave up on trying to describe time in exact language and he wrote of the three tenses, past, present, and future, saying: AThis customary way of speaking is incorrect, but it is common usage. Let us accept the usage. . There are few usages of everyday speech which are exact, and most language is inexact. Yet what we mean is communicated.@ (ibid, 26).
We may not be able to explain what time is in exact words. But life in the world will come to a standstill if time were not to be measured. If there were to be no time, or if there were to be no measurement of time we would not know when to get out of bed in the morning, we would not know when to leave home, when to begin our activities, when to end our activities, when to start today=s Mass and when to end it. Duration needs to be structured on the basis of human perception so that life will not come to a standstill. And so we use clocks, we use watches, and we use diaries and calendars to give us an idea of where we stand in the flux of time. God himself comes to meet us in this flow of time.
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The various feasts of saints, the various events marked on the Church=s liturgical calendar bring to our immediate awareness the decisive moments in the history of our salvation. But in our immediate awareness there is memory and there is expectation. There is no life without immediate awareness, without memory, and without expectation. And what is true of life in general is also true of the christian life. Our christian life is a life of immediate awareness, of remembrance and of expectation. We are Christians because we are aware of the need for salvation, the need for healing. A need which is ours, a need which is the need of our world. We and the world around us are in dire need of healing. We are Christians because we remember the saving deeds of God in the life of our world. We believe God has already begun the healing process. But the patient needs to cooperate with the physician. And we are Christians because we live in the hope that the fullness of salvation will one day be ours. We stay wide awake as Jesus tells us in today=s Gospel. We live in expectation, expectation of the day when God will bring full healing to the wounds inflicted on us, to the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves, and to the wounds we have inflicted on others. In the course of the Church=s liturgical year which begins today, the First Sunday of Advent, we shall call to mind those decisive moments in the history of God=s relationship with us. But we shall not just be calling them to mind, we shall also be looking forward to the completion of God=s work of salvation. We shall not just remember, we shall be in expectation. We begin the liturgical year with the season of Advent, and Advent is about expectation. Advent is about a future. We may find it difficult or impossible to describe what time is. But if life must go on we must be able and willing to say: It=s time. And what Advent tells us is: It=s time.
It=s time we closed up the gap between us and God. After telling God to mind his business, after telling God not to intrude into our privacy it=s time we asked God to come back. It=s time we stopped ignoring God in carrying out our daytoday affairs, even the most private ones. It=s time we asked for God=s personal intervention in our world, in our lives. It=s time we stopped pretending to be solving the problems of the world when in fact we are complicating them by trying to solve them without God. It=s time we heeded the advice St. Anselm of Canterbury gave in his Proslogion: AInsignificant man, escape from your everyday business for a short while, hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. Make a little time for God and rest a while in him.
AEnter into your mind=s inner chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek him; and when you have shut the door, look for him. Speak now to God and with your whole heart: I seek your face; your face, Lord, I desire@ It=s time we prayed with St. Anselm:
ALord, look upon us, hear us, and enlighten us. . . Teach us to seek you, and when we seek you show yourself to us [your very self], for we cannot seek you unless you teach us, nor can we find you unless you show yourself to us. Let us seek you in desiring you and desire you in seeking you, find you in loving you and love you in finding you@ (Second Reading, Office of Readings, Friday, First Week of Advent).
Fr. Anthony A. Akinwale, O.P.
AThey left their nets and followed him@ (Mt 4,20)
St. Philip Neri Church, Waban, MA, Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle,
November 30, 1993
In his first letter to the Corinthians, one of the rhetorical questions the apostle Paul asked was: AWhat have you got that was not given to you?@ (1 Cor 4,7) Of course the answer is obvious to any man or woman of faith: Nothing. There is not one thing we have which has not been given to us by God out of his generosity.
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If that is true, then there is not one thing we have that we should not be willing to give up if God demands it, and if giving it up will enhance our relationship with God, our greatest treasure. Yes, we should be willing. But in fact, we are not willing; or, to put it differently, we are not often willing to let go what we have and what we cherish. And that is human. It is human not give up something you cherish without a good fight. And many times we give God a good fight. Even Jesus did. The human nature in him was reluctant to give up his life in the garden of Gethsemane. AFather! For you everything is possible. Take this cup [of shameful suffering and death] away from me.@ The human nature in him recoiled from death, that irretrievable loss of physical life. He was only willing to die when he embraced the will of God. ATake this cup away. . .But let it be as you, not I, would have it@ (Mk 14,36).
Let us come to Andrew and his companions. It is quite easy to read the story of their while the serious issues it raises escapes our attention. If Andrew and his companions were to be our contemporaries, what they did in the Gospel we have just read would have made them qualify for the epithet: Religious fanatics. Why? Because they gave up their means of livelihood. It is like someone telling you about giving up his/her job in order to give more time to God.
If I had a well paid job, or even one that is not well paid, and someone came to ask me to give it up, I would ask: why? The human nature in me will put up a good fight to hold on to my means of livelihood. Yet, Is God not asking you and me to give up something? Could that thing be my lifestyle? A well paid job? A relationship? My perspectives? Presuppositions? Outlook on life?
Those are things we are not usually willing to examine, because examining them might reveal the need to give them up for the sake of a greater good, a greater good that is not immediately evident, a greater good that does not give instant gratification. But if Andrew and the first disciples left everything and followed Jesus, then the story of their call dares us to examine them and to ask the unpleasant question: what is that thing which, if I give up, will enhance my relationship with Christ?
I am reminded of a song that is famous in many charismatic prayer groups in Nigeria. The words are: AIf I have Jesus in my life I am satisfied. Even though I have nothing I am satisfied.@
Fr. Anthony A. Akinwale, O. P.
The Importance of Witnessing
St. Philip Neri Church, Waban, MA, 3rd Sunday of Advent (B), December 12, 1993
In the Gospel we have just read, John the Baptist, in response to the questions put to him by the representatives of the central authority of Jewish religion, introduced himself. He confessed he was not the Messiah. He was not Elijah. AI am@ he says Athe voice crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord!=@ John the Baptist was the voice raised on behalf of Christ. He was the messenger sent before Christ to prepare the hearts of men and women for the coming of Christ. He was the witness sent to bear testimony about Christ.
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The Aselfintroduction@ of John the Baptist as a voice bearing witness to Christ is consistent with the way Jesus is presented in the Gospel according to John. A careful reading of the Gospel according to John reveals that in that Gospel, faith and witnessing go together. In John=s Gospel, there is a sense in which Jesus as Son of God does not usually bear witness to himself. Often, it is others who bear witness to him before the world. And so, in the fifth chapter of John=s Gospel, when Jesus was confronted for curing a sick man on a Sabbath and accused of bearing false witness about himself by speaking of God as his Father, part of his response was to say: AWere I to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be true; but there is another witness who speaks on my behalf, and I know that his testimony is true. You sent messengers to John, and he gave his testimony to the truthCnot that I depend on human testimony; no, it is for your salvation that I mention it@ (Jn 5, 3133.37)
Today, by presenting John the Baptist to us as witness, the Gospel is challenging each of us to be like John the Baptist in our world, in our own preparation for Christmas. John the Baptist is presented to us as a witness so that we too might be witnesses. In concrete terms, whoever has faith in Jesus as the Son of God must also bear witness to the identity of Jesus before the world. Faith in Jesus is not something you keep secret. It is not something for which you apologise.
What the Gospel is telling us by presenting the figure of John the Baptist to us is quite different from what contemporary culture is telling us. For while the Gospel is daring us to be like John the Baptist in the world, while the Gospel dares us to raise our voices on behalf of Christ individually and collectively, the world is saying to us: you may be Christians but keep Christ within the four walls of the Church. The implication is this: if Christ is to be kept only within the confines of the Church then Christ cannot be allowed to come out even during the preparations for Christmas. Christ has to be kept on lock even on Christmas day. As a Christian, you do not have to be in the closet provided you keep Christ in the closet. And there are many ways by which that message is communicated to us.
Let us carefully observe some of the greeting cards we buy or receive during this season. Every year, there are many AChristmascardswithoutChrist@ that are put on sale. It seems there is a reluctance on the part of those who design many of these cards to keep Christ out of the picture. Think of the card which, instead of wishing you a merry Christmas, simply wishes you a Ahappy holiday season@ without any mention of Christmas. Think of the greeting card which, instead of a painting of the manger or of the Magi, bears the painting of a house covered with snow, or the painting of Santa Claus, or the painting of a living room filled with gifts. Talking of Santa Claus, last Sunday at the children=s Mass, I asked the question: whom are we expecting at Christmas? The response I got from some of the kids was: ASanta!@.
Philosophers of art have rightly pointed out that artists do not just produce works of art. They communicate a message. They expose the depths of the human heart through their paintings and sculpture. Sometimes, the easiest way to know what the people of an era think about life is to look at the works of art produced during that era. If that is true, then many of the greeting cards that are on sale these days give the impression that those who design them think of Christmas as nothing more than a holiday season, or as nothing more than a house covered with snow, a family living room full of gifts, or Santa Claus laboring under the heavy weight of his bag of gifts. There is no reference to Christ on these cards, nothing to show on these cards that this is a season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ. Since it is said that out of sight is out of mind, could these AChristmascardswithoutChrist@ be part of a grand design to take religion out of sight so that religion will be out of mind? Your guess is as good as mine.
Whether or not this is a grand design, we Christians have a choice: we can either raise our voices on behalf of Christ, as John the Baptist did, or we can keep Christ in the closet and maintain silence. The ball is in our court. But in making our choice, let us bear in mind that faith in Jesus is neither something to be kept secret nor something for which I have to apologise. If, as John=s Gospel tries to teach us, faith and witnessing go together, then we cannot claim to have faith in Jesus when we are not ready to bear witness to him as John the Baptist did.
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Fr. Anthony A. Akinwale, O. P.
My Choice and God=s Choice
St. Philip Neri Church, Waban, MA, 4th Sunday of Advent (B), December 19, 1993
There are some questions we do not usually want to confront. Even though we need to ask them, we are inclined to evade them because their answers are too true for comfort. And, in order not to be unsettled there appears to be a readiness to seek comfort in ignorance. It might seem comfortable to remain in selfignorance because knowledge of the self can be unsettling. It might seem comfortable to remain in ignorance of the self because to try to know my self, to try to know how I really stand before God, is like trying to look at the sun with one=s naked eyes.
In the life of every adult, or in the life of every human being who makes claims to adulthood, asking fundamental questions and making making fundamental choices are coincidental. We cannot make good choices without asking questions. For in making a choice I am asking a question: what must I choose? And because the choice I make has to correspond to who I am, I must equally ask the question: who am I?
As Christians we ought to recognise the fact that we cannot know ourselves apart from God. I cannot answer the question: who am I? without any reference to God. The human person is a mystery surrounded by many mysteriesCmysteries we cannot unravel without God. But if I can neither pose nor answer the question: who am I? without reference to God, and if I cannot make a good choice without knowing who I am, then it follows that I cannot make any choice apart from God.
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Today=s first reading and Gospel invite us to examine the choices and the plans we make. A question that pops out of a careful reading of those two scripture passages is: what is the relationship between my choice and God=s choice, between my plan and God=s plan? In the first reading, King David, after his successful military campaigns, was planning to build a house [Temple] for the Lord. But the Lord had a different plan. So God sent the prophet Nathan to David. AGo, tell my servant David, Thus says the Lord: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in?. . .Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me: your throne shall stand forever.@ And so, in what looked like a dramatic change of plans, it was no longer David who would build a prestigious temple for God, it was God who promised to make the Davidic dynasty last forever. God was saying to David through Nathan the prophet: Rather than build me a house I shall build a house for you.