Vigils Reading

COME, LORD JESUS

By Fr Johannes Pinsk

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Advent means coming, the coming of the Lord. If we want to celebrate

Advent with the Church, we must first seek to understand what this means:

“God is coming.” the word “coming” may be regarded as one of the primordial

words in the language of religion, for if religion is the loving and unifying

encounter with God, it can only be realized when God comes. Unfortunately the

same thing happens with God’s coming to us as with his loving us — in both

cases we want to take the second step before the first one. We think that we must

love God first so that he will love us first; and yet, in his first letter Saint John

states expressly, Here is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us. Yes,

we must love God because he first loved us. We cannot come to God unless he

first comes to us.

This coming of God is not merely an interior, spiritual affair; it happens

rather in palpable, concrete forms. So the coming of God has the same meaning

as the revelation of God. Those, therefore, who carefully read and contemplate

the words of holy scripture, which are a sign of his continued and continuous

coming, will not find it difficult to understand that the actual content of

scripture is the proclamation of the coming of God. His coming is the key to the

history of the Old Testament and the basic theme of its people, but this is only a

prelude to that coming of God in which the Word was made flesh.

All these are ideas with which we are very familiar, so familiar in fact that

we tend to think that everything has already been fulfilled. God has come in

Jesus Christ; through him he is with us in his grace by faith and the sacraments.

Gospels: Year A; introduced and edited by John E. Rotelle, Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995, pp. 16-17.7

Each individual Christian personally, and the Church of Christ as a community,

is a sign of the fact that God has come and is with us forever. Lo, I am with you

always, even to the end of the world. These are the words of our Lord at the end

of Saint Matthew’s gospel.

We Christians today are so conscious of the joy of our belief in the

presence of the Lord, above all in the Eucharist, that we almost forget that Christ

himself continued to speak of his coming right up to the end of his earthly life,

even though he was already present, He spoke of a further coming, beyond the

Church and the sacraments.

Although the One who is to come has already appeared, the New

Testament, like the Old, is full of the promise and expectation of a new coming

of Christ. The gospels speak of it, so do the apostolic letters, and most of all the

Revelation of Saint John. This final book of the Bible teaches us: The Spirit and

the Bride say, “Come.” Let him who hears say: “Come.” He who testifies to

these things says: Yes, indeed, I am coming soon, and the congregation of the

faithful cries out once more: Come, Lord Jesus!