Tuesday, First Week of Advent

There is a striking beatitude in today’s gospel reading, ‘Happy the eyes that see what you see…’ It is a beatitude that embraces us all. Jesus declares us blessed because we have seen him with the eyes of faith and heard him with the ears of faith and in seeing and hearing Jesus we have seen and heard God. Jesus says in that gospel reading, ‘no one knows who… the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son choses to reveal him’. Jesus has revealed God to us and we have responded in faith, with our eyes and ears. We have come to recognize the face of God in Jesus and to hear the word of God in what Jesus says. There is a privilege involved in this, because, as Jesus says, the prophets and kings of Israel wanted to see what we see and never saw it; to hear what we hear and never heard it. Rightly Jesus says to us, ‘Happy/blessed are you’. Advent is a season to grow in our appreciation of the way God has blessed us through the sending of his Son to us. It is an opportunity to listen more attentively to what God has said to us and is saying to us through Jesus and to see more deeply into the mystery of God present in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As we see more clearly and hear more attentively, we open ourselves to being changed by what we see and hear. We become more like the one we see and hear, so that we can bring him to others. That is our Advent calling, to see the Lord more deeply, to listen to him more attentively, so that we become more like him and, so, witness to him more fully. Our ultimate destiny according to the first letter of John is ‘to be like him (God), for we will see him as he is’. We can anticipate that destiny in the here and now.