Fr Matthew Reese

Dear Friends,

On Sunday, we began the season of Advent—but you wouldn’t know it from the lessons.

Next Sunday, on Advent II, we will hear “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,” John the Baptist, announcing the coming of Christ (Luke 3:1-6). On Advent III, we hear the completion of these prophecies (Luke 3:7-18). And it’s not until Advent IV that we actually hear the story of the Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:39-55).

For a season in expectation of the Christ child, you’d think we’d have a longer walk to Bethlehem.

But our lessons from Sunday (Luke 21) and this week’s Daily Office (Luke 20) all derive from a very different moment—the days after Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Here we are preparing for the Incarnation of our Lord, but everything we read points to the days before his death on the Cross.

So why this seeming disconnect?

The architects of our Lectionary—like the authors of the Gospels—wanted us to see the clear parallel between these two pilgrim journeys—one to Bethlehem, the other to Jerusalem. They wanted us to see Jesus’ end foreshadowed in his very beginning.

And throughout Advent, we have all sorts of signs and symbols of this reality. Like in Lent, we don our violet vestments, we sing the Great Litany, we omit our songs of praise. Our music changes, the charism of our prayer changes. Everything is cast as a mirror image of Lent. We hear about Jesus’s lineage and inheritance. We feel the weight of the prophecies he has come to fulfill.

On Christ the King, I ended my sermon with a stanza from Peter Warlock’s beautiful Christmas carol, “Bethlehem Down:” “When He is King we will give him the King’s gifts, / Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown, / “Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph / Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down. / When He is King they will clothe Him in grave-sheets, / Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown […]”

The gifts of the Magi prefigure the instruments of Christ’s passion and death. The crown of gold will become a crown of thorns.

But this is not cause for sadness. Because it is only in his miraculous Incarnation, in his taking on of our humanity, that Jesus can—in suffering death on a cross—defeat death itself. And this is where we’re headed.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew