‘Behold Your King Comes’ by Randall Smith

The Catholic Thing is a kind of little miracle that ripples out to touch lives in powerful ways.”  – Archbishop Charles Chaput

Behold Your King Comes

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In his advent sermon Ecce rex tuus venit tibi (“Behold your king comes to you”), Thomas Aquinas distinguishes four ways Christ “comes” to us: the first “advent” is the one in which He came in the flesh; the second, when He comes into our souls; the third, when He comes to us at death; and the fourth is His Second Coming at the final judgment. During Advent, we are preparing ourselves for all four.

A friend reports that his priest told the congregation that Advent isn’t a penitential season, but a time for joy. My friend’s immediate thought was: “If it’s not a penitential season, Father, then why are you wearing purple?” He might as well have been doing a funeral mass in black and said: “This isn’t a mournful time. It’s a time for joy.”

Actually, it could be both: a time to mourn the loss of a loved one and joy at the promise of the resurrection: mourning because of our very real human experience of loss, and joy because of a faith in the reality of a promise that exceeds the grasp of human reason. They can co-exist. We know by reason we have lost something dear to us, and yet, deep down, in a center of ourselves we barely know ourselves, we know by faith that our loved ones are alive with God in Christ and therefore still present with us, in us, and all around us in the communion of saints.

Similarly, Advent is both a penitential season and time for joy. Christ is coming; this is good news. We prepare ourselves by keeping “sober” and “awake.” A penitential season in expectation of Christ’s coming can be a very joyful thing. A season lost to drunkenness and dissipation usually is not.

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EDITORS NOTE: This article first appeared in The Catholic Thing.

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