2^nd Sunday Advent Year C 4^th December 2021

Dark mornings and even darker evenings. Cold days when all you want to do is huddle up in the cosiness of your heated rooms.  It’s winter time and in a few days’ time we will arrive at the shortest and darkest day of the year. If we go into town, however, the sparkling colours of man-made lights chase the darkness away, enticing us to make merry and to spend our money. But their brightness gives only a passing fragile joy. For most of us they give no hope, only fear of debt and insecurity.

At the beginning of Mass, we lit the Advent candle to remind ourselves that there is hope in the midst of this darkness. The light of the candle is not so much to chase the darkness away, as we might with the glittering, shimmering tinsel of down-town. It is rather a sign of hope. We light the candle to remind us that there is light that breaks through the darkness and gives us hope , an eternal hope – Christ is our light as we will celebrate and proclaim at Christmas.

There is a brightness too in our Advent readings today. It draws us toward the great feast of light, Christmas, the birthday of the one who is the light of the world.  With the birth of Jesus, the light of God’s love shines out.

In today’s first reading, the prophet Baruch looks forward to a day when ‘God will guide Israel in joy by the light of his glory.’

St paul experienced darkness in the prison of Ephesus on his way to certain death in Rome. Yet, the letter he wrote from there to his friends of the church in Philippi is full of joy and hope. He praises the Christians there for their example of faith and for the way they share everything they have with each other and the with the poor. He is hopeful for their future, assured that they will remain faithful to Jesus, as Jesus is always faithful to them. Despite his situation, Paul does not fall into despair and negativity. He remains full of joy and hope.

In the darkness of winter, we too can fall into despair and there is much to despair about: the resurgence of COVID and the recurring threat to our health and our superficial freedom; the awful news pictures and stories of the migrants massing on the borders of Poland or drowning in the Channel, misused as political pawns by governments frightened of their right-wing voters. Then we are horrified as we watch elements of our society crumble into drugs, and the ensuing violence and terror on some of our streets.

We pray for anyone going through dark days at the present time, for people insecure in their jobs or their health or their home life, and displaced people and refugees, who wait at barbed wire borders, hoping to get to a better life; for those barely alive in the famine of East Africa and in countries torn apart by civil strife and terrorism.

Paul bids us to look at life, and, especially, at people, through eyes tinted with hope, even in dark times. His praise of and joyful message to the people of Philippi remind us of the way Jesus always looked at people; able to see beyond the exterior, right into the goodness of their true selves. To see people through hopeful eyes makes us aware of the good in their lives. To look with the eyes of hope and love, lets us recognise the good they have done rather than what they have failed to do. Paul hopes that God who began this good work among them would bring it to completion. He had high ideals about what people could become with God’s help.

Let’s look at ourselves too with hopeful eyes, with the eyes of God and the eyes of St. Paul. God’s good work has only begun in us. We are a work in progress. God will bring the good work to completion. All we need do is to co-operate with the working of grace. By the end of our life this work will be complete, and we will have reached ‘the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us’.