HOMILY for 2nd Sunday of Advent (EF)
Rom 15:4-13; Matt 11:2-10
“Excita… Domine.” For the last two Sundays, and again today, the Collect of the Mass has begun with these words: “Rouse up, we beseech you, O Lord…” And we will hear it again on the fourth Sunday of Advent. So, four times over this time of year and in this season of Advent, the Mass opens with this word Excita, meaning excite, rouse up, arise, stir up. It is an allusion, perhaps, to psalm 80:2, “Stir up thy might, and come to save us!”, calling upon God to come and rescue us. The allusion is clearer in last Sunday’s Collect: “Stir up Thy power, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and come”, and it is a prayer addressed directly to God the Son, asking Christ our Lord to come into our world as our Deliverer, to protect and save us from sin. What is implicit in this prayer, though, is made more explicit in today’s Collect.
For how is it that Christ will come to save and protect us from sin? If our focus is simply on his historical first coming at Advent, then we are speaking about the objective reality of what Christ has accomplished by his incarnation and his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Christ, in coming as Man has rescued Man from the sin of Adam. However, Advent, as I noted last Sunday, is concerned with the second coming of Christ as our Judge. So, Christ comes, definitively at the end of time, to deliver the Elect, his chosen ones, his holy Church, and to put an end to sin and its effects. The Collect, then, becomes a prayer suffused with eschatological hope, looking forward to Christ’s return in glory. And this, of course, is fitting for Advent. Indeed, the cry of the early Church, Marana tha, (Come, Lord!) is echoed in last Sunday’s Collect, “Stir up Thy power… Lord, and come!”
However, this Sunday’s Collect, deepens our understanding of precisely the manner in which we desire Christ to come and save us: it isn’t historical, in the past, nor something visible in the future. Rather, we ask the Lord to come here and now to us. Christ comes to us unseen and invisibly but truly through grace. Thus St Bernard of Clairvaux says that between the two comings of the Lord in the flesh there is an “intermediate coming [which is] a hidden one; in it only the elect see the Lord within their own selves, and they are saved.” Today’s Collect alludes to the coming of divine grace into our own selves; a prevenient grace, one might say, meaning, a grace that goes before in order to prepare us to be receptive to the Lord. So we said in the Collect: “Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of Thine only-begotten Son”.
This means that, even before we can pray, even before we can do anything good, anything that has merit in God’s sight, we need God’s grace to move us, to prepare us, to cause us to be receptive. It is God, therefore, who first acts to choose us as his own; it is he who gives us our vocation, we might say, and so it is he who, foreseeing all things, has predestined us for glory, and so he gives us his grace to accomplish this. In a nutshell, this is the vital aspect of Catholic teaching on grace, on divine predestination, that safeguards the sovereignty and utter necessity of God’s grace for us human beings. For as Jesus says in St John’s Gospel, “without me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). Without the grace of God moving us, preparing us, supporting our good actions, and bringing them to perfection, we can do nothing good, including pray, assent to God’s Word in the Scriptures, obey the moral law, and so on.
A contrary notion, and sadly very common these days, would hold that we human beings can still do good and turn towards God and be saved purely through our own wills and natural reasoning, independent of God’s graced first moving us. There is in modernity, therefore, this idea that Man’s reason and will is sovereign, and seemingly on a par with God’s. And yet, the Council of Trent corrected this kind of thinking. It said: “God touches the heart of man with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, but man himself is not entirely inactive while receiving that inspiration, since he can reject it; and yet, without God’s grace, he cannot by his own free will move toward justice in God’s sight.” In other words, no human being can, simply by his own power and will, resist sin and be saved.
In today’s Collect, therefore, the Church prays for that which we had not been able to ask for ourselves, namely, for God’s prevenient grace that prepares one for conversion, and that brings a person to faith and trust in the Saviour. So we, in praying this in the Church’s Liturgy today, are praying for the countless others who have not yet heard the Gospel, who do not yet believe, and who are not yet Saints, just as, since the 8th-century when this prayer began to be said in the Advent Liturgy, the Church has been praying for you and for me. We pray, therefore, that God’s grace will stir up our hearts and prepare us to serve the Lord when he comes, and so to be protected and kept safe from sin. Hence scholars say that today’s Collect is a correlative of last week’s Collect. Because last Sunday we asked Jesus to come and save us from sin, and today, we pray that God the Father will save us from sin by first moving our hearts, inclining us towards the good, preparing us to be open to divine grace, and to say “Yes” to the Father’s will. In fact, the coming feast of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception shows us the primacy of God’s grace and the astonishing power of prevenient grace in the lives of the elect. For it is God’s prevenient grace that sanctifies Mary from the moment of her conception, choosing her and causing her to be the predestined Mother of God. So, too, God’s grace has been at work in us, even before we were baptised, even before our conversion to faith in Christ. Today’s Collect points to the primacy of God’s grace, and the Liturgy prays for all those who are still to join us in worshipping the one true God.
Moreover, we pray today for ourselves. During this season of Advent, we ask God for the grace of a deeper conversion to his ways, a greater authenticity in our Christian lives; we pray God’s grace to come invisibly to excite our hearts; to rouse us from the slumbers of sin, and to stir us up from our complacency. Thus St Bernard says, “Let [God’s Word, ie: Jesus Christ] enter into your very being, let it take possession of your desires and your whole way of life. Feed on goodness, and your soul will delight in its richness. Remember to eat your bread [ie: sacred Scripture], or your heart will wither away. Fill your soul with richness and strength.” For it is only through this coming of Christ within our selves, as St Bernard says – through the coming of God, through grace active in us – that we are thus kept from sin and saved.
Today’s Collect, therefore, is a prayer for now, and indeed for every day, that the Lord will stir up our hearts with his grace, and so prepare us for salvation and good works, even as St John the Baptist had been sent to prepare the world through repentance and miracles for the Son’s first coming.
