First Tuesday of Advent: God’s Pleasure
Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 71:1-2,7-8,12-13,17; Luke 10:21-24
Jesus’s joyful thanksgiving at the start of today’s Gospel is addressed to the seventy disciples who had returned from their mission of proclaiming the Kingdom. The words are sometimes called His “hymn of joy”.
What is the cause of our Lord’s pleasure? He is pleased with these seventy disciples who are carry out His mission because they see His divinity. He then goes on to stress who he is: the one who knows God the Father, and reveals Him. In a similar way, we can please God by carrying out the mission he has entrusted to us, personally – in Bl. John Henry Newman’s words discerning “some definite service… which He has not committed to another.”
The classic film “Chariots of Fire” contains a memorable line on this theme. Eric Liddell, a committed evangelical runner, explains to his sister, Jenny, why he wishes to postpone Christian missionary work in China for another, subtler mission in competing as a runner at Olympic level: “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”
The best way to find out the “definite service” to which God has commissioned us, is to come to know Him in prayer, and holy scripture, approaching both with a humble outlook, a child-like faith. St. Bernard writes, “God was beyond reach and comprehension, invisible and superior to all human thought. But now he has willed to be seen and understood, to make himself known to human understanding. How? By lying in a manger, by preaching on a mountainside, by spending the whole night in prayer, by handing on the cross in the agony of death, and freed from death, overcoming the power of death, rising from the dead on the third day, showing the apostles the marks of the nails as a sign of his victory, and finally, ascending to the heights of heaven before their very eyes. Is any part of his life unworthy of profound and pious meditation? When I contemplate these events, my mind is on God, and through them, my thoughts can reach God.”
If we contemplate these events, and fix our minds on God in a special way this Advent, we will not only find our mission, we shall also feel His pleasure.
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