Third Sunday of Advent
The faith is recall and expectation
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain, brothers, about one another, that you may not be judged. Behold, the Judge is standing before the gates. Take as an example of hardship and patience, brothers, the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Jas 5,7-10
Let’s immerge ourselves into the spirit of this passage of the Letter of James, to live in its fullness the time of the Advent. We must have two certainties, one historical and the other in the faith: the historical one is rooted on the fact that Jesus Christ, the one who had to arrive, already arrived; the certainty in the faith derives from the fact that he will have to be back in the world because as he promised. We live between the remembrance of the past and the expectation of the future, as the farmer who, being aware of having planted the seed ”waits with trust the precious fruit of the ground up to having received the first and the last rains”. Our is an eschatological certainty, which will take place according to the times of the Lord, connected to the arrival of the rains, which cause the seed to taint underground and make growing the ear of the new humanity. These rains are the occurrences of the faith and of the history: the evangelization, the conversions, the persecutions, the treasons and the blessings of the Lord, in a dynamic where the sky and the earth are involved. The dying and resurrecting to a new life has been the human experience of Christ and it has been continuously over the centuries the experience of the Church as well as the one of the man of faith in the experience of the everyday life. We have, as today James says, to wait for the arrival of Christ, with the same “endurance” and “firmness” showed by the prophets in waiting for the first arrival. Some people, during this waiting which is longer than the one expected by James, are discouraged because it is easy to lose the awareness that Jesus Christ already came to the world, but the Church does not discourage. It knows from where it comes and to where it has to go. It is waiting the second arrival of Christ in the faith and the love, as the spouse in the Song of Songs: “Hark! my lover-here he comes springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills. My lover is like a gazelle or a young stag. Here he stands behind our wall, gazing through the windows, peering through the lattices.” (Sg 2,8.9)