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Letters Third Sunday of
Advent I Thessalonians 5:16-24 |
The Catholic Telegraph
December 10, 1999Once more we hear the preaching of John the Baptist, this time as recorded in the gospel of John. The questioners want to know about the Baptist - who are you and what are you up to - and he insists on telling them who he is not. He says, in effect, "I’m not the Christ, not Elijah, not the Prophet that Moses spoke of. I’m just the advance man for somebody that’s already here in your midst and who is to come after me."
The apostolic reading tells us what John the Baptist’s response to his questioners means for us. Jesus is in our midst, too, and is still to come.
The First Letter to the Thessalonians is the first of the letters that Paul wrote to his converts and is the oldest book of the New Testament. It’s a short letter, filled with encouragement. Like most of Paul’s letters, it has a section at the end devoted to practical matters, generally matters having to do with Christian moral life. Our reading is from this exhortatory section in the First Letter to the Thessalonians.
Paul invites the Thessalonians to live in joy, prayer, and thanksgiving. That’s what God wants from them. They are to use and appreciate the gifts that they have been given. Paul prays that they may be made "perfectly holy" and preserved from sin in view of the coming of Christ. He invites them to be confident, since "the one who calls you is faithful, and he will also accomplish" what has been promised.
This reading is a call to hope, and it constitutes the agenda for Christian believers of every age.
The "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" is something that we are all invited to look forward to, not as some secondary feature of God’s plan for salvation, but as a central feature of it. The coming of Jesus at the end of time is the final fulfillment of what God had in mind for us from the beginning. In one of his sermons (9.4) St. Augustine says, "Anyone who doesn’t think about the age to come, and is not a Christian precisely in order to receive what God promises at the end, is not yet a Christian."
In the meantime, however, Christ and His Holy Spirit are not absent, as if waiting offstage for their entry cue. No, they are present and active in the Christian community now. Their presence and action is expressed primarily in the holiness that we have been given, the life of Christ to live in our lives, a life that is not some sort of inert image imprinted on our souls, but a living life that calls for development and growth. Responding to and expressing the life of Christ in our individual existence is one of our primary responsibilities as believers. We are called to make the Lord present and active in our families and our homes, in our jobs and in our leisure, in outreach and care for those in need. In our personal spirituality, we are called to grow, through prayer and reflection, in awareness of the Lord’s presence and action in who we are and in what we do. We are already holy, but Jesus calls us forward to becoming "perfectly holy" by cultivating the basic gift we have received. "Do not quench the Spirit."
But holiness is not the only gift we have received. There are more specific gifts, too, that we are called to treasure and use, gifts of personal talents and abilities, gifts of love and friendship that are extended to us through those whose lives touch ours, gifts that come to us through the community of the Church. We have all sorts of personal equipment to help us grow in our own holiness and to help others grow in theirs.
True, we are called to look forward and to wait, but the waiting has a purpose. The waiting is to be productive. And the God who calls us to the future can be relied on to be busy with us here and now as well.
This is where joy and thanksgiving come in. Our life as believers is not a list of do’s and dont’s and rules to keep. It’s not a matter of sitting in some sort of life-long dentist’s chair waiting for God to be finished with us. Our life as believers is a matter of working with the Lord to bring His world to fulfillment, of doing our part to bring about ultimate happiness for all those who will accept it. And the Lord promises to work with us, just because He loves us, just because He is faithful.
Real Christian believers are people of hope. They know that they have wonderful things to look forward to in the ultimate future, but they also know that today and tomorrow are the context for God’s blessings, too. They know that what is to come is God’s gift, but they also know that they have been enlisted as God’s collaborators in the giving. They know that their life has never-ending significance because of what God has done for them and because of what God has enabled them to do for Him. That’s why they "give thanks in all circumstances." That’s why they "rejoice always."
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Conversation Questions:
How do I cultivate the Spirit in my life?
How is my life an ongoing act of thanksgiving?
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