“DIE ON, DIE ON, IN HUMILITY”
Saint Matthew 21: 1-9
Ad Te Levavi—First Sunday of Advent: 2 December Anno Domini 2018
Father Jay Watson SSP
Happy New Year! Today marks the First Sunday of Advent—the beginning of The Church’s new calendar year, Anno + Domini 2019 (though we will wait until the secular calendar rolls over on December 31st before writing those numbers on our checks and letters).
Advent, the Latin Adventus is the translation of the Greek Biblical word Parousia, meaning, the second-coming of Christ, The End of all this sin.
So, while it certainly is not wrong to view Adventide as a preparatory period of Scriptural meditation, prayer, repentance, fasting, and alms-giving as The Church journeys to the annual celebration of The Lord’s Nativity and The Great Christ-Mass, a deeper reality is that you are all closer on your Exodus, your Pilgrimage to your own individual end, and to the final Eschaton—The Parousia.
Advent must be about getting ready for the end. Ask yourselves, are you first of all taking care for what comes last? The Last Things are death, judgment, heaven or hell. But are not those also the first things?
What transpired at the beginning of the end, at the fall? God is Peace and Order, Gospel Love—giving and caring in the context of His own rules and orderly being—and the orderliness of a perfect creation. Man willingly, by choice, succumbed to chaos by rejecting Life of Obedience and Family and reaching for death—death of order and place; death of station, service; and death by riding on the will and ego of self-righteousness and self-judgment. Adam may have thought he had reached for self-fulfillment when he grasped the forbidden fruit, but all he really did was gulp down a serpent skull and bony skeletal rotten mush of dust, ash, brimstone, and death.
Ever since, all of you, all of mankind, by nature, seeks to ride on the majestic white stallion of triumph, mammon, and self-will. Just look at how you’ve treated people this last week. Are you humble and on the back of beast of burden, loving your neighbor as yourself? Or are you storming around on a charger barking orders and eating up others as a roaring lion seeks to devour its prey? That’s why God comes to fix things not as your James and John “natures” would have: “Lord when you come in your KINGDOM, let me sit on your right or left hand…on thrones!”
Jesus fixes your arrogance and pride by coming as a different kind of king: “meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass.”
Adam sought to kill the king. Adam reached out with delusions of grandeur for the tree of treason. He chose to be “like God.”
Christ sought to make you kings and queens—Royal Priests, and family members once again. With humility and passive obedience; with the same gentleness and lowliness that He exhibited when born of The Virgin, he let the mundane ass, a beast of burden typifying Himself, carry Him into His destiny with a different tree—a cross shaped wooden throne of suffering and death. Adam tried to be a god, but Jesus—GOD OF GOD, LIGHT OF LIGHT, VERY GOD OF VERY GOD, BEING OF ONE SUBSTANCE WITH THE FATHER—became Man to fulfill The Father’s will for Mankind: to be at Peace.
And thus, the Son of Man rides into Peace, city of Shalom. There, or more precisely, outside the city gates on the place of a skull, The Living Head of His Catholic Body would lay down His life so that you could be lifted up. No anointing with oil from olives but rather the atoning anointing of sweat, spit, and blood. No clothes and palm branches spread on the ground at Calvary but rather nails and thorns piercing the flesh that feeds you life.
A strange tableau for The First Sunday of Advent—this reading which also adorns Palm Sunday? No, not really. There is no forgiveness without blood. There is no meal without The Lamb. There is no New Adam until the old Adam dies and is buried. The donkey that may have been with the infant Jesus in the stable has its brother most assuredly with The Christ as He rides on not to the wood of the creche but to the wood of The Crucifix. It’s always Palm Sunday in the sense that Christ from eternity deigned to ride on to the cross. The Hymn “Ride on Ride on in Majesty” is also more accurately “Ride on Ride on in Humility.” And this scandal is your birthright and your testament and your feast: “We preach Christ Crucified.” And, Christ coming again on the clouds—Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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