Real Monasterio de Guadalupe

Today’s Gospel according to Matthew 11: 11-15

John the Baptist invites us to an active, demanding Advent. Celebrating the coming of God, next Christmas, is not only a matter of feeling and poetry. The grace of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany calls for full availability, openness to the life that God wants to communicate to us. It supposes, as Isaiah preached and the Precursor repeated, preparing roads, smoothing, filling, straightening, sharing with others what we have, doing penance, that is, changing your mind.

In Advent those two hands should meet: ours that reaches up to God asking for salvation, and God’s, which offers us much more than we can imagine. It is not so much that God comes out to meet our supplicating hand, but we who joyfully realize the hand extended by God towards us. Advent is before God’s grace than our effort. Although both are in the mystery that we celebrate. Hopefully all of us, as Isaiah promised, «let’s see and know, reflect and learn at once, that the hand of the Lord has done it.»

Fr. Antonio Majeesh George Kallely, ofm