At my first parish assignment at St. Columbkille in Parma, concluding Mass every Christmas, the choir would break into a full-voiced, exultant rendition of the Halleluiah chorus—a song praising Christ as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The well-known Halleluiah chorus is just one movement of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah oratorio—which begins, not with loud jubilation, but rather softly—with single voices, singing verses from the prophet Isaiah. Music lovers and aficionado’s would probably tell you that you can barely begin to really appreciate the Halleluiah chorus, only when you’ve allowed those soft melodies to lead you to that point.
Similarly, with Christmas as a whole. Advent is very subtle and soft season, only with hints of Christmas jubilation. Primarily next week, the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday is rather jubilant, but most of Advent is quiet and reflective. In fact, those eight days before Christmas, beginning December 17, are especially solemn and quiet. We call those days late Advent or deep Advent, like the deep of night during which Christ was born.
Advent beckons to us to seek Christ in the quiet, to listen to the voice crying out in the desert, as we heard in the Gospel today. Many of our contemporaries seek to “get in the Christmas spirit” by listening to Christmas music piped over department store speakers, but Christians prepare for Christmas best, not by way of the bombardment of the senses, but with the contemplation of messages nearly drowned out by modern noise—the promise of God’s desire to come to souls who wait in expectant longing.
What was the message of the voice crying out in the solitude and quiet of the wilderness, in the Gospel today? It was a message of repentance, the call to conversion, to seek the Lord’s help in straightening the crooked parts of our life.
St. John the Baptist preached a message of repentance. The Greek word for repentance, you’ve probably heard before is Metanoia. Metanoia involves a change of heart, a change of mind, a willingness to change one’s life, a willingness to hand over to God the coldness, the impatience, the lust, the self-centeredness that always seeks to take root in us.
Jesus wants to live in you and reign in you. What’s the obstacle to that? Us, our sin and our selfishness. How do we open the pathways of our life best to Christ? Through the Sacrament, Christ himself has given us. In the Sacrament of Confession we seek that Metanoia, that change, that encounter with Christ that changes us forever.
As you will read in my bulletin column this week, I will be increasing the availability of the Sacrament of Confession for this season and for the indefinite future. Confessions will be available for a whole hour on Saturdays, from 3:30 to 4:30, and also in between the Sunday morning masses. Additionally, our area’s annual communal penance service will be on Tuesday, December 11 at 7pm at St. Mel’s.If it’s been more than a few months since your last confession, it’s time! Make a good thorough examination of your conscience, an examination of your life in light of the 10 commandments and all the teachings of Christ and the Church. Allow the Holy Spirit to help you identify some of those crooked parts of your life, that parts God desires to convert and transform.
Envy, callousness, pride, all these things threaten God’s life in us—these attitudes drive out the life of God in us, and confession prepares our hearts for God to once again dwell and live and reign. Confession banishes darkness and reignites the light of Christ in our souls dimmed through venial sin or extinguished through mortal sin.
God is so eager to wash us and purify us in the Sacrament. And Advent is the time the Church eagerly runs toward encounters with God. Our Collect for this 2nd Sunday put it well, asking God to not allow any earthly undertaking to hinder us in setting out in haste to meet God’s Son. What an important prayer, as so many people are running toward Christ but, in all honesty, running away from him.
In the confessional, we receive a comfort that nothing in the world can possibly provide. The comfort, the consolation and the joy of hearing from the priest that our sins are absolved. We cannot absolve ourselves, though many try. But, unabsolved guilt will always eat at us until it is absolved, through the means Christ instituted. So, the sooner we go to confession the better. The fear, perhaps, of confessing an embarrassing sin cannot compare to the relief we receive when that sin is confessed.
To hear those quiet, subtle words, I absolve you from your sins…your sins are forgiven…are probably the most consoling words we can hear this side of eternity. For they are a true sign of God’s love for us and his mercy. I don’t know about you, but I’ve often emerged from confession wanting to sing the Halleluiah chorus myself. The angels are certainly rejoicing, for as the Lord himself taught, there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine who do not repent.
We willingly undergo acts of repentance, we seek to make straight the paths of our lives so that not only we can walk in the ways of righteousness, but so Christ, the Righteous One may walk the corridors of our lives. He desires to seek out the lost through us, to challenge the complacent and comfort the afflicted through us. And the absolved soul is eminently more hospitable to Christ than the one who does not think he is in need of confession.
I may be belaboring this point, only because I know the Lord wishes to meet many of you in the confessional this Advent. And I hope you respond to his invitation.
For there is no greater way to prepare our hearts, minds, and souls for Christmas, than by taking seriously the call to Advent conversion, metanoia. that in the words of our second reading today: “you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” and the salvation of souls.
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