1st Saturday of Advent
If you listened carefully to the first reading, you may have realized that it’s addressed to each one of us personally, to you and to me: “No more will you weep…he will be gracious to you when you cry out…with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher”. Isaiah is speaking about the love of God coming down, not on people in general, an abstraction, a community, but on every single person that makes up that community.
It was that way with God’s only Son in today’s Gospel: “At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them.” He loved them all because he loved each one in the crowd. The sick he cured, the dead he raised, the lepers he cleansed, translating God his Father’s love for the world into a special love for each individual.
Such a love, being divine, did not cease after Jesus came into the world as a human being. Today he comes to each one of us individually in the Eucharist, in what the Cistercian Fathers used to call a “third coming”, in between his first coming at the incarnation, and his second coming at the end of time. This “middle coming” is the one in which we can say with St Paul, “Christ loved me and gave himself for me”.
There is divine love coming to us this day in Christ’s Body and Blood. Will he find a human love to receive him?
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