We are given hopeful and evocative images from the first reading for this Third Sunday of Advent: “In my God is the joy of my soul” (Is 61:10). Well, why? What elicits this burst of joy? “For God has robed me with a robe of salvation and wrapped me in a mantle of justice” (Is 61:10). This is the promise of the Coming One. Salvation will be bestowed, accompanied by a ‘mantle of justice’. A mantle of justice covering our earth, falling like snow, wrapping us all in its power to heal and to change all of our lives. This Christ birth comes with the power for growth and change: it begins with each one of us, and it will happen in spite of ourselves!!! “As the earth brings forth its plants…so will the Lord God make justice and praise spring up before all the nations” (Is 61:11).

Image above:Masako Tobita (b.1954), Hampshire County Council’s Contemporary Art Collection https://artuk.org/discover/stories/millennial-pink-the-artists-who-got-there-first

Each birthing forth of God’s life involves an inner transformation, an evangelizing experience where we become in mind and heart more Christ-like in our service, in our love, which opens us to deal with conflicts, and helps us face our fears and anxieties.

“Is longing not a voice? It is indeed, and a very powerful one” (Song of Songs, #74, p.87). With these words from St. Bernard, we enter Advent, a time when the veil covering our longing falls away, and we hold this longing as something precious, so precious that we do not want to lose it. With longing silently pulsating, we wait…we wait, awake and attentive to the movements of the heart. Advent invites us into the silence where longing becomes a voice, a voice that calls upon the Word of God to return: ‘Return, return’, she cries out, ‘be born again in our lives’. The powerful voice of longing…silently speaking, asking only our attentiveness, our presence, our hope and faith.

The gospel reading for this Sunday is the parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30). The talents are distributed to three persons: one gets five, the second two, and the third one talent, “each according to their ability”. According to Sr. Carolyn Osiek even one talent was a large amount of money. To note one scriptural source that she mentions, she says that just one talent, according to the book of Maccabees (8:11), was “the price for ninety slaves” (Give Us This Day, p.164, November 2020). Why, then, would the servant who had the one talent go off and bury it? What is the dynamic motivating his action? We are told that the person with the one talent perceived his master as ‘demanding’, ‘harvesting where he did not plant’, and ‘out of fear’ he went and buried the talent. Perhaps one reflection out of this gospel is to ask ourselves how does fear control, hinder, or immobilize us in doing something with the one talent, the gift God has given us?

“To sorrow in the suffering of the world together may be what we need to embrace now, something beyond hope, deeper than hope, which is to honor our grief of a changing world. . . Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time.  To feel the pain of now and not look away.  To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially our own families” (Erosion, at 273). I find these words of the writer Terry Tempest Williams profound and not unfitting for this 32nd Sunday’s liturgy where we are encouraged to stay awake, to be present, to be ready for the encounter with the Lord. She is saying that our tendency, way too often, is to project forward, especially to project our hope forward…always forward and the suggestion is that perhaps we do this when we are clearly not ready.