Second Sunday of Advent—9
December A.D. 2012
“Now the God of hope fill you with all
joy and peace in believing,
that you may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Ghost.”
Ordinary
of the Mass
Mass Text - Latin
Mass Text - English
Blessing of the Advent Wreath
Our God is the God of
hope—perhaps I should say that He is the God of hope and no change—but
we can speak about the importance of eternal permanence at another time;
perhaps on that Sunday after Easter when we read Saint James’ beautiful
Epistle which speaks of “every perfect gift ... coming down from the Father
of lights, with whom there is no change nor shadow of
alteration.”
For today, let us stick to God as the God of Hope.
We must begin by defining
hope. What does it mean to hope, or to have hope? Well, we know that hope
is one of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. They are
called “theological virtues” because they have God as their proper
object—although, sometimes they help us to achieve earthly ends because of
God’s dominion over all nature and mankind. More specifically, “hope is the
virtue by which we trust that God ... will, in His mercy, give us eternal
happiness and the means to attain it.”
We might ask: Why do we have
reason to hope? The honest man knows that he is a sinner, and knows that he
has done very little to expect such a great reward as being happy forever
with God. Even the very religious can do very little of their own to please
God—for the most part they must make use of things He has given them.
As Saint Paul suggests, we
have hope because of “the comfort of the Scriptures.” That is to say that
we have hope because the Sacred Scriptures portray the many things God has
done for us over the centuries that are necessary for our eternal salvation,
and the recognition that God does nothing in vain. From the very moment of
the fall of Adam and Eve, God promised to send a redeemer to make things
right again—you remember the phrase from what I had to say on the feast of
the Immaculate Conception: “I will put enmities between thee and the
woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt
lie in wait for her heel.”
The Sacred Scriptures are a
running account of God’s dealings with His people. From the physical
salvation of a few people on the Ark with Noe, through the covenant with
Abraham, through the Exodus from bondage in Egypt, through the captivity in
Babylon, God never fails to accompany His people. He deigns to tell them
about Himself to that they may know and love Him; He gives them His
Commandments so that they can live a life pleasing to them; He accepts
their earthly sacrifices as though they were of value to Him. Even in the
Old Testament, as Saint Paul makes clear today, God is the God of all
peoples, not just His chosen few: “Rejoice ye Gentiles with His people.”
Our reason for hope becomes
even more clear in the New Testament. The promised One who would “crush the
head of the serpent”—in the Virgin Birth promised by God through the prophet
Isaias: “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and his name shall be
called Emmanuel”—after centuries of waiting, that promised One came into the
world.
“Emmanuel” is translated “God with us.”
And, with that promised One,
Jesus Christ, hope abounds. He visibly manifests God’s love for His
people: “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf
hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
He feeds the hungry in the desert, He forgives the sins of the repentant, He
preaches about the kingdom of Heaven, and describes what must be done to get
there.
The most hopeful thing of all
is that He makes it possible to get there. The sin of Adam made it
impossible for mankind to enjoy eternal life. All of mankind’s puny
treasures rolled together were an inadequate gift to make reparation. All
of the sacrifices offered at the Temple, for all of those years, were but a
mere token of the sacrifice necessary to undo the effects of Adam’s sin.
But God, the Son of God, became man and offered the perfect sacrifice on
behalf of mankind—He offered the sacrifice of Himself.
We have hope, also, because
the Scriptures record that our Lord provided for all the generations of the
future by establishing the Sacraments—so that the graces of the Sacrifice of
the Cross could be communicated to all believers, regardless of the
difficulties imposed by time or place. The Sacrifice of the Cross itself
would be re-presented
“from the rising of the sun even to the going down,”
as predicted by the Old Testament Prophet Malachias: “my name is great
among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is
offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the
Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts.”
(Again note that God’s people are not restricted to any one race.)
In addition to Holy Mass, our
Lord instituted the Sacrament of Baptism, so that the hereditary sin of Adam
could be removed from the souls of those who believe in Jesus Christ: “He
that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.”
The Baptized would receive Jesus Christ Himself in the “clean oblation” of
Holy Communion: “I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall not
hunger: and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.”
If the Baptized fell from grace, their priests had the power of
forgiveness: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them: and
whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”
The Scriptures tell us of the
other Sacraments that would sanctify the lives and the deaths of the
Baptized: Confirmation, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction.
So, clearly, the Sacred
Scriptures assure us that our God is the God of Hope—we have good reason to
“trust that God ... will, in His mercy, give us eternal happiness and the
means to attain it.”
“Now the God of hope fill you with all
joy and peace in believing,
that you may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Ghost.”
NOTES:
(Sorry, the internet is down here, so no URLs for this week's
citations.)
