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36 Days & 36 Ways Daily Meditations from Advent to the Epiphany - Year B
by Henry Wansbrough
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 First week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Second week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Third week of Advent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Christmas Eve and Christmas Week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 New Year’s Eve to Epiphany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Picture credits: Page 3: Nativity with the St Jerome (fresco), Bernardino Pinturicchio (1488-1490) Basilica di Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, Italy. Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com. Pages 78-79: Adoration of the Magi detail, 1423 (tempera on panel), Fabriano, Gentile da (c.13701427) / Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved. First published 2017 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY. Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Text © 2017 Henry Wansbrough. Design and layout © 2017 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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ISBN 978 1 78469 195 0
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Introduction For Christians the most treasured time of the year is Easter, the season of Christ’s death and resurrection, but the time of Christmas and the preparation beforehand runs it close. The purpose of this booklet is to help you take a full part in that time. For each day from the first Sunday of Advent till the festival of the Epiphany there is a reflection on the scripture readings offered by the Church at the Eucharist. Each day has a few words from the readings at the beginning, but it would be still better to read the whole excerpt in a missal or Bible. At the end of each reflection is a suggestion of how you might put the spirit of Christmas into action. The best way of appreciating and sharing in these reflections is to set aside a short period of each day. Ask the Lord to help you to understand what he has to say to you through these readings. Then read the scriptural passage slowly and reflectively, followed by the meditation. Don’t hurry, and pause whenever you are drawn to prayer. It may be useful to read the scriptural passage again at the end, and gather it all together in a quiet prayer. If you do this with others, it may be helpful if each person shares their reflections on the readings.
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First week of Advent First Sunday of Advent, 3rd December “So stay awake, because you do not know when the master of the house is coming, evening, midnight, cockcrow, dawn; if he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake!” Is 63:16-17; 64:1, 3-8; 1 Co 1:3-9; Mk 13:33-37
On this first Sunday of Advent the Church puts before us three readings which flood us with emotions, from three different worlds, yet all full of expectation at the beginning of Advent. What are we waiting for? What will Christmas mean for us? The first reading, from the third part of the Book of Isaiah, drops us into a world after the return from exile in Babylon. All is not going well. The inhabitants of the little group of returned exiles, huddled round Jerusalem, are still all too conscious of the way they had let down their Lord who had promised them an eternal covenant. The promised restoration had not yet come. “We are all like filthy clothing, like withered leaves, O that you would tear open the heavens and come down.” That applies to us too!
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The Gospel reading gives us a vivid parable from Jesus. The Kingship of God, the reign of his Father, on which he put his whole confidence, would suddenly come. We don’t know, his hearers didn’t know, Jesus himself didn’t know when it would be. The evangelists see as a foretaste and symbol of it the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. It will come as suddenly as a trap is sprung. The saints say they are ready and will simply carry on, like the doorkeeper ready to open the door to the Master. Then Paul, writing to that quarrelsome Christian community at Corinth, begins his letter with encouragement. They are rich in many ways. Quarrelsome they may be, but at the same time they are rich in the Spirit, lacking nothing of the gifts of the Spirit, manifest in the Christian community in all kinds of ways. In our communities, too, the Spirit is working in each member in numberless ways. Let us admire them in those around us, and aspire to share such gifts of the Spirit in this season, and wonder at the Spirit in those around us, waiting for Christ.
Action: Just take a moment to think of all the wonderful gifts of the Spirit in all the Christians around you – each one has something different to contribute, a different gift to the community.
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Monday 4th December When Jesus heard this he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you solemnly, nowhere in Israel have I found faith like this. And I tell you that many will come from east and west to take their places with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven…” Is 2:1-5; Mt 5-11
Isaiah is the Prophet of Advent, and nearly all the First Readings are taken from that book. Today’s first reading is an invitation to all nations to go up to Jerusalem to learn from the Lord, and to draw salvation from the Lord. So the Gospel reading also shows that salvation is not just for the Chosen People, the children of Abraham, but for people of all nations who are prepared to go up to the Lord. The centurion can hardly have been a Jew, perhaps a Roman, perhaps an auxiliary from some other nation in the service of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee. He knows his absolute authority over his troops, but that knowledge has taught him also that it has its limits. It has taught him also what respect and reverence for other values are. In Capernaum, the lakeside town where Jesus seems to have taken up residence when he was hounded out of Nazareth,
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was he the first gentile to recognise Jesus, to submit his own military authority to a higher authority, an authority with power over life itself? An encouraging message, the breadth of the salvation offered, as the nations flow in to the feast of the Kingship of God. But is there a warning too? The citizens of Capernaum were no doubt waiting with confidence for salvation too, but failed to take it when it came. Matthew the Jew is well aware of the position and promises of Israel, and yet he has no hesitation in telling us that in no one in Israel has Jesus found such faith. Are they all missing out on the promises? Are we Christians waiting with a similar complacency, unaware that we are putting our trust elsewhere, so that the joy of Christ is passing us by? Will the feast in the Kingdom of Heaven be a jolly party of fellow-Christians, or will it be puzzlingly full of complete strangers, who have been more faithful to their God-given ideals and beliefs than Christians?
Action: How slovenly and disrespectful am I about signs of reverence, signs of the cross, genuflecting? Are they in fact signs that I have lost consciousness of the divine reverence due to the Lord?
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Tuesday 5th December “Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Is 11:1-10; Lk 10:21-24
Why are these two marvellous texts brought together? The Isaiah passage, often read at Confirmations, tells of the seven gifts of the Spirit, climaxing in the fear of the Lord, and then goes on to describe the perfect peace in nature which the Messiah will bring. The Gospel passage tells – in a way more typical of the Gospel of John than of Luke – of the mutual affection between Father and Son, in which the followers of the Son may share by his gift. On the one hand these readings form a Trinitarian banquet: Spirit, Father and Son, in which those to whom the Son reveals it may share. More profoundly, it tells us about the nature of the fear of the Lord. The summit of the gifts of the Spirit is the fear of the Lord, but this is not fear in any sense of terror. Perfect love casts out fear. You can’t love God and be terrified of him; but like fire and the great cosmic phenomena of nature, God can be approached only with overpowering respect; you can’t pal up with God. This
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love is an intimate affection, of the sort described between Father and Son, where there is no fear, but only closeness. And yet the noble qualities described by Isaiah in the first reading, leading up to the fear of the Lord, do not indicate chumminess: wisdom, insight, counsel and power. They indicate a certain penetration to the depths of being. They imply an awe before the incomprehensible, a reverence for what is beyond us, for the great values over which we have no control, before which we can only stand in awe, wonder and admiration. Just so, we cannot by ourselves rise up to any relationship with the Father, but can reach it only through the Son, as “those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.� The gifts of the Spirit, of these great and awesome qualities, can give us a distant glimpse of what can be revealed to us in the love of the Son and the Father.
Action: Consider the beauties of nature, of sound and sight, of generosity and self-sacrifice, and from there proceed to reflect on their Maker.
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