What is Advent? (Advent I - Cycle A)

This Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new liturgical year. Our society has different ways of calculating the timespan of a year. The civic calendar goes from January 1 to December 31. Schools follow the academic calendar, which begins late summer or early autumn and lasts until the spring. The fiscal year starts on July 1 and ends on June 30. A number of ethnic groups also maintain their own traditional calendars.

In the Catholic Church, our calendar is the liturgical year. We start on the First Sunday of Advent, which is the Sunday closest to the Feast of St. Andrew, observed on November 30. We then follow a sequence of seasons and feasts throughout the year, until the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of the liturgical year.

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Photo Credit: Advent wreath: Week #1 by Eugenio Hansen, OFS from Wikimedia Commons.

Welcoming Christ to Be the King of Our Lives (Christ the King - Cycle C)

This Sunday, we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, which is more popularly known as the Feast of Christ the King. While the feast has biblical roots, its observance was instituted one hundred years ago by Pope Pius XI. He did so in response to the increasing secularization of Western Civilization, whereby Christ was being pushed more and more out of the public sphere. The pope sought to remind the faithful and the world at large that Christ is King of all the world, now and always.

Before the coming of Christ, the Israelites expected the Messiah to be a great military conqueror, who would overthrow the Roman Empire, which was occupying the Holy Land at the time. In place of Roman rule, the Messiah would set up a new, glorious Israelite kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital. The new kingdom would be the strongest in the world and all the nations of the world would bow down to Jerusalem.

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Photo Credit: Roof fresco of Pantokrator, Nativity of the Theotokos Church, Bitola, North Macedonia from Wikimedia Commons.

Is the End Near? (33rd Sunday - Cycle C)

The Catholic liturgical year runs from the First Sunday of Advent to the Feast of Christ the King, which we will celebrate next Sunday. As we get close to the end of the liturgical year, the readings at Mass focus on the end of the world. Predicting when the world will end is something of a pastime in some parts of American culture. However, the Catholic Church has never tried to predict the time of the end of the world, since Christ has clearly told us that it is not for human beings to know when the world will end.

Instead, we are to live with the expectation that the world might end at any time, while still being focused on our day-to-day responsibilities. A good way to approach the question is with the Benedictine Latin motto "ora et labora," which means to pray and to work. We should pray as if we were about to die in any moment, as if Christ were to return right now. At the same time, we should work as if we were to live in this world indefinitely.

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Photo Credit: The Last Judgement by Fra Angelico from Wikimedia Commons.

Living With a Single-Minded Focus (25th Sunday - Cycle C)

One significant theme in the writings of the Old Testament prophets, a theme we see in this Sunday's first reading as well, is the condemnation of the exploitation of the poor. Dishonest business practices are immoral in any situation, but they are especially reprehensible when the people defrauded lose everything. Most people in ancient times lived in a subsistence-based agricultural economy, with very little margin to protect against starvation. The passage from Amos lists several business practices that were used by some unscrupulous merchants to take advantage of such vulnerable families. Then, once a family's livelihood was destroyed, those who exploited them could force them into slavery, causing them to work for the benefit of others on their own ancestral lands. Amos and the other prophets decried such exploitative practices in no uncertain terms.

The Psalm for this Sunday goes further. In this passage, we see the depiction of a new social order, in which the poor are lifted up and are seated with princes. We see the creation of a new social order without the stratified economic divisions that have characterized most societies in history, where birth determined one's economic condition for life. The fullness of the vision might only come to fruition in Heaven, but God wants us to strive for bringing about a more just society already here on earth.

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Photo Credit: Parable of the Unjust Steward by A. Mironov, from Wikimedia Commons.

The Cross Alone Gives Meaning In This Life (Exaltation of the Holy Cross - Cycle C)

This year, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, the 24th in ordinary time. The feast supplants the regular Sunday readings and prayers, which very rarely happens. The change underscores just how deeply the Church honors the Holy Cross.

As we look at the feast, we see that the assigned Gospel Reading contains perhaps the single most famous passage from the Bible in American culture - John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life." The passage is often quoted especially by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians and is a favorite verse to hold up on signs at sporting events. How does the Catholic Church interpret this passage?

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Photo Credit: Wayside cross in Baroña, Galicia, Spain, from Wikimedia Commons.

Why Did Jesus Speak of Hate? (23rd Sunday - Cycle C)

The message of the Gospel passage for this Sunday might seem shocking at first sight. What could Jesus possibly mean by this statement: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple" (Matthew 14:26)? Doesn't Jesus want us to love our families? Doesn't he want us to have a healthy sense of self-love? How should we interpret his words?

To understand his words in this passage, we need to bear in mind two important aspects of the society in which Jesus proclaimed the Gospel. Ancient Israelite culture relied greatly, as do many cultures today, on the use of hyperbole, which entails deliberate and often excessive exaggeration in order to drive a point home. The manner in which Jesus spoke very much reflected the conventions of his culture.

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Photo Credit: Conversion of St. Paul by Michaelangelo from Wikimedia Commons.

What Is Humility? (22nd Sunday - Cycle C)

Both the First Reading and the Gospel Reading for this Sunday teach about humility. The Greek philosopher Aristotle and later St. Thomas Aquinas, who drew upon his work, both saw virtues as the golden mean between two extremes. Humility can be seen as a virtue between the two extremes of self-absorption and self-hatred.

On the one hand, an exaggerated ego is clearly a vice. In this state, we make ourselves the center of the universe and consider our own wants and desires the most important thing in the world. Being egocentric is deadly for us because it closes us off from God's love and destroys our relationships with others in our lives.

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Photo Credit: Foot washing - Chapel of the Holy Sacrament - Basílica of Aparecida - Aparecida 2014 Wikimedia Commons.