This is the second week of Advent. In less than 20 days Christmas would have arrived and gone!
The point of these first weeks of Advent is to ‘locate’ us, to ‘place’ us in our reality, to ‘insert’ us in our own history so that Christ (Christmas) can actually find us!
On Christmas night we will acclaim a Saviour. But ‘salvation’ and ‘saviour’ are not concepts, values, ideas… they are facts, events, that presuppose a reality, a history, a real and concrete needs. Today’s Gospel ends with these words: “Every man (every ‘flesh’, literally in Greek) will see the Salvation of God”. To see the Salvation of God is to experience a ‘history of salvation’ and a ‘geography of salvation’. Our Saviour needs a ‘stable’, a postcode address, where to be born.
This is why these first weeks of Advent are so, so important. They tell us ‘where we are’, where you are. In the first week of Advent, we heard that we are in the ‘night’, that is, we are lost, in fear, alone, in need of a light, a direction, a victory over our deep fears. In this second week of Advent, we hear that we are in the ‘desert’, we are empty, vulnerable, without life within, in need of a liberator, a healing, a life-giving Word.
Let us not waste this precious time. Let us enter our ‘history’ and ‘geography’, our ‘nights’ and our ‘deserts’, because it is precisely there that we will see the Salvation of God!
