1st Sunday of Advent - Year C - Promise and Fulfillment & “Come, O Long Expected Jesus”
Every Advent, the Liturgy of the Word gives our sense of time a reorientation. There’s a deliberate tension in the next four weeks’ readings: between promise and fulfillment, expectation and deliverance, between looking forward and looking back. In today’s First Reading (Jer. 33:14-16), the prophet Jeremiah focuses our gaze on the promise God made to David, some 1,000 years before Christ. God says through the prophet that He will fulfill this promise by raising up a “just shoot,” a righteous offspring of David, who will rule Israel in justice.
Today’s Psalm (Ps.24) also sounds the theme of Israel’s ancient expectation: “Make me walk in your truth and teach me. For you are God my savior and for you I will wait all day.” We look back on Israel’s desire and anticipation knowing that God has already made good on those promises by sending His only Son into the world. Jesus is the “just shoot,” the God and Savior for whom Israel was waiting.
Knowing that He is a God who keeps His promises lends grave urgency to the words of Jesus in today’s Gospel (Lk. 21:26-36). Urging us to keep watch for his return in glory, Jesus draws on Old Testament images of chaos and instability: turmoil in the heavens, roaring seas, distress among the nations and terrified people. He evokes the prophet Daniel’s image of the Son of Man coming on a cloud of glory to describe His return as a “theophany,” a manifestation of God. Many will cower and be literally scared to death. But Jesus says we should greet the end-times with heads raised high, confident that God keeps His promises, that our “redemption is at hand,” and that “the Kingdom of God is near”.
In honor of the start of the Advent season, we would like to share our latest video “Come, O Long Expected Jesus”, a hymn by Charles Wesley that praises the coming of Jesus Christ and signals the beginning of Advent for countless Christians around the world. The hymn was written to help people remember Advent and Christmas as commemorating the Nativity of Jesus and preparing for the Second Coming. It also expresses the sigh of longing for the day when we are with Jesus in all of the fullness and glory He will bring.
Video can be watched by clicking here or on the picture below:
