"Maranatha"

All of us at times have asked the question: “Where was God?” We see some terrible story on the news or we experience some tragedy in our own lives, and we just think “God, why were you not there? Why did you not act?” In a world where we see much darkness and evil, the seeming absence of God’s presence can sometimes be difficult to bear. For some people, this can even be the reason to doubt or deny a belief in God – they struggle with understanding how a good and merciful God could allow evil and not act. Why would God seem to be silent, why does he appear to be idle when clearly so much is wrong with the world?

These feelings are nothing new. People of faith throughout history have felt the same. We see an example in our first reading. The people of Israel in the first reading are in exile in Babylon, a thousand miles from their homeland of Canaan. The favored people of God had been overrun by a pagan king, deported from their homeland, and now dwelled as prisoners in a foreign land. It would have seemed impossible for them to return, and at this point, many abandoned hope. They thought, “God, why did you not act? Why have you abandoned us?”

To these cries of anguish, the prophet Isaiah tells the people to take comfort. He prophesies that not only will God end their exile, but that he himself will lead them back to their homeland himself and he himself will care for them like a shepherd cares for the flock. While these words may have been dismissed by many as foolish, the Jewish people did return to their homeland and renewed there their covenant with God.

Sidney Nolan, Desert Storm (c. 1955)

The season of Advent at its heart is one of waiting, even one of longing – eagerly, anxiously desiring the Lord to set aright the evils of the world. It is also though a season of remembrance, of recognizing that God has acted already. Throughout the history of Israel, God intervenes to rescue his people – from enslavement in Egypt, from destruction at the hands of the Assyrians, from exile in Babylon. Most importantly, in this season we recall how God acted definitively by sending us a Savior, Jesus.

This year, we have the happy occurrence of this Second Sunday of Advent falling right between the two Marian feasts of Advent: the Immaculate Conception of Mary last Friday and the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe this coming Tuesday. With Mary’s Immaculate Conception, we celebrate that God breaks through our dysfunction in ways that perhaps are unseen by us but nonetheless are real – that is, that even as we cry out for salvation, he has already been at work in secret. Mary was conceived without sin because God knew she would be the mother of our Redeemer, and so his action to preserve her sin was answering our need in ways that we did not even yet know. In the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, we recognize how the God of majesty and power comes in humble, lowly ways. The God of eternity and of infinite power is born to a young girl in a quiet and far-off place. Yet, this unassuming virgin is herself mighty in power because of the child she bears, and powerful also for us who are her spiritual children. As she said to Juan Diego in her apparition, we should let nothing disturb or frighten us, because in her we have a loving mother who will care for us just as she cared for her Son, the God-Man.

So we may indeed wonder, “Why does God linger in resolving the injustices of the world? Why does he not act?” But St. Peter speaks clearly in our second reading – God has acted, by giving his Son Jesus, to save us from our sins. It is because he desires the salvation of all of us – because he does not wish to lose even a single one of us to eternal separation – that he waits. It's not delay, really, but patience, and he is patient because we are hesitant, untrusting, uncommitted.

And yet, one day God will act, his Son will return, and then all wrongs will be righted, every hill made low, every valley filled, and all will see the glory of the Lord. The early Christians had a word that was especially fitting for this Advent season: “Maranatha.” The word is an Aramaic formula that means the coming of the Lord and it can be translated in two ways. The more common translation is a command: “Come, O Lord!” It is an expression of our longing, our desire for the Lord Jesus to come and render justice for the evils we see around us. But it can also be translated, “The Lord has come.” And this perhaps is the deeper, important meaning for us – that even as we yearn for God to fix what must be fixed, to rescue us from our plight, to save us from all that ails us, we remember that he has come, and that he has done these things for us as a comfort to never doubt or be afraid.

My friends, our fundamental belief as Christians is that God does not ignore us; he is not absent. He has not only acted in human history, he has become one of us in the Incarnation. This is not just a private religious opinion that we hold, but a firm belief that underlies everything that we understand about the world. We may go through difficulties and wonder why the Lord seems to delay; but we must not doubt or be afraid, because God has acted and is acting in and through his Son Jesus. Like the early Christians, let us say “Maranatha” – “The Lord has come. Come, O Lord!” – and be steadfast in making straight the path for when he does.