From the Desk of Deacon Dave, O.F.S.

Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,

May the Lord give you His peace!

Happy New Year, and Welcome to the Year of Matthew!

On Saturday, November 26, 2022, as the sun sets and the daylight fades, as the Church prays Evening Prayer I (First Vespers) of the First Sunday of Advent, the Church’s Year of Grace 2022 ends and a new Year of Grace 2023 begins. Hence the greeting –  Happy New Year!

The Church’s liturgical year unfolds with the end of one year leading seamlessly into the beginning of the next. For instance, on November 13^th, the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, we encountered an end-time teaching of Jesus from the Gospel according to Luke (21:5-19) describing “wars and insurrections, nations rising against nations, powerful earthquakes and famines, plagues from place to place, and awesome sights and mighty signs coming from the skies.” The message: we must always be prepared for the coming of the Lord!

Now as we move into a new liturgical year, the Church nourishes us with a new cycle of readings from Sacred Scripture, Year A for the Sunday readings and Cycle I for the weekday readings in Ordinary Time. And so, on this First Sunday of Advent in Year A, we hear proclaimed another end-time teaching of Jesus, this one from the Gospel according to Matthew (24: 37-44) in which the Lord warns us that “two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left”; the same with two women grinding at the mill. He admonishes His listeners, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” The message: we must always be prepared for the coming of the Lord!

The Universal Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar (39) has this instruction about the season of Advent and its meaning for us: “Advent has a two-fold character, for it is a time of preparation for the Solemnities of Christmas, in which the First Coming of the Son of God to humanity is remembered, and likewise a time when, by remembrance of this, minds and hearts are led to look forward to Christ’s Second Coming at the end of time. For these two reasons, Advent is a period of devout and expectant delight.” Additionally, it seems entirely reasonable and beneficial to use this time to prepare ourselves spiritually for that moment – known to God alone – when He will come for us at the end of our individual pilgrimages on earth. The message: we must always be prepared for the coming of the Lord!

Advent is a season of anticipation. It recalls the hopes of our Hebrew ancestors, so often expressed during Advent in the words we hear from the writings of the Prophet Isaiah, which we believe were realized in Christ’s initial coming. It is also a season of our own future hope. That these hopes are not just wishful thinking but grounded in the reality of our faith becomes evident in a posture of moral awareness and wakefulness. The message: we must always be prepared for the coming of the Lord!

The Church expresses this Advent sense of expectation and longing for the coming of the Lord during the praying of the Lord’s Prayer at each Eucharistic liturgy when the priest celebrant adds the following words to the community’s prayer: “Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.” The message: we must always be prepared for the coming of the Lord!

This new liturgical year will provide us with fresh opportunities to encounter the Gospel according to Matthew at most of our Sunday celebrations. By way of some preliminary background, Jesuit Father Daniel Harrington shares the following insights in the introduction to his scholarly commentary on this Gospel (Collegeville Bible Commentary, 1983, pp. 7-10): 

“Matthew’s Gospel has a strongly Jewish flavor. Its special concerns are to place Jesus of Nazareth within the traditions of God’s chosen people and to show how this same Jesus burst the bonds of those traditions and brought them to fulfillment. From beginning to end, there is a tension between tradition and newness. Neither pole of the tension is rejected. The interplay between the two generates life and fresh insights. Matthew takes pains to point out how this or that event in Jesus’ life fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament.

“Matthew did not compose the Gospel entirely out of his own imagination and experience. He appears to have had at his disposal several written sources. In chapters 3-4 and 12-28 he drew heavily on Mark’s Gospel. Mark wrote before Matthew did, and so it is fair to call Matthew’s Gospel a revised and greatly expanded version of Mark’s Gospel. Furthermore, in about two hundred verses Matthew and Luke are so much alike that it is reasonable to assume that both evangelists made independent use of a common source, usually designated by the letter Q (from the German word for “source,” Quelle), a collection of Jesus’ sayings that circulated in Greek in the fifties of the first century A.D. Finally, Matthew had access to sayings and stories that no other evangelist had.

 “Matthew’s Gospel was put into final form around A.D. 85, perhaps in Antioch of Syria. That means that the Christian community had existed about fifty years since Jesus’ death (and resurrection), and about fifteen years since the Jerusalem temple had been destroyed in A.D. 70.” So, welcome to the Year of Matthew!

May this holy season of Advent and the beginning of new year of God’s grace draw us closer to the Lord and to one another in the communion of the Church! May the Gospel of the Lord truly be our rule of life – to the glory and praise of our Triune God! 

With a brother’s love in the Lord and Mary Immaculate,

Deacon Dave, O.F.S.

T    In Persona Christi Servi