15 Dec 2017
The mantra of the Advent season is: Come, Lord Jesus,
come! “O come, o come, Emmanuel and
ransom captive Israel.” “O come, divine
Messiah, the world in silence waits the day.”
“Come, O long expected Jesus, come to set your people free.” That’s our mantra, our song: Come, Lord
Jesus, come!
But, of course, he already did come once. He’s already given us something of the “light
of life,” by way of his commandments, his teachings, his pouring forth of the
Holy Spirit on us in baptism. The Lord
has come to us. And he’s given us a
sense of the direction we should go in life.
Jesus has set us on the path of heaven.
We just have to follow it. So, in some respects, our prayer—Come, Lord
Jesus, come—has already been answered.
Of course, as we all know, sometimes we wander off that
path. We sin. And then we find ourselves…lost in the woods,
in the ditch, in the darkness—who knows where.
But that’s when the “unanswered” aspect of our Advent prayer comes in:
Come, Lord Jesus, come! Help me, lead
me! But, you know, that prayer is never
a prayer of desperation.
Jesus has come to us before.
And because of that, we know that even when we’re lost, we needn’t be
afraid. He came before; he’ll come again…as
often as we need him, and especially at the end of time. And so, our prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus, come!”
is a prayer of confident hope.
It’s like my little dog who waits for me to get back to the
rectory. He knows I’ve been there
before. He knows I come and go. And so, he just waits…not with anxiety, but
with peace and maybe even with some anticipation. May we do the same with
respect to our Lord. He’s come before,
he’ll come again. Even in times of
darkness, we needn’t worry about that.
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