16/12/2025

Tuesday Week 3 Advent

Yesterday my reflections were very much dominated by the tragic events that were unfolding in Australia but which are certainly yet another of the failures of mankind to be faithful to the WORD.

In yesterday's Psalm we prayed "Lord teach us your ways" and in the Gospel the Scribes and Pharisees were confronted by Jesus with a question that they correctly understood to be a challenge to their integrity and so they avoided it by refusing to answer.

Jesus' "Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things" is not an empty riposte in reply to a moot point. It is a confirmation to each of them and to each individual who has ever lived since then that there is always only one answer to our human dilemmas.

The events on  Bondi Beach and all other such "Evils" that have happened, are happening and maybe will happen are known by our all-knowing God to be the cumulative results of all human failures either to do his will or to respond to the challenges he makes as we come face to face with the WORD which is the teaching present in both Testaments that comprise Scripture.

The vastness of the power of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT is matched only by the vastness of his justice, mercy and love. In his self-revelation, however, he treats each tiny one of us as an equal and offers us the freedom to make our own positive or negative response to the Love out of which we have our being.

He also knows that even being aware of our own existence can be an overwhelming task for such tininess in His Spiritual and Material Universe and has thus never left us alone. Jesus tells us that we can address the vastness of God as "Dad".

In this morning's first reading Zephanaiah's  insight into the purpose of IAMIAM is that He 

"Will leave in your midst  a people humble and lowly,

They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord,

Those who are left in Israel;

they shall do no injustice and speak no lies,

nor shall there be found within their mouth a deceitful tongue.

For they shall graze and lie down

and none shall make them afraid."

The INCARNATION is the fulfillment of this vision and Jesus' teaching in word and deed enables the whole world to become "Israel", "The People of God", for even the greatest of sinners is free to make the right choice to seek forgiveness and avoid sin.

Two thousand years ago in the animal shelter in the hill country of Judea, at David's City there occurred the event for which we are now preparing,  the reality of which has been largely lost within its own "Celebration" . For that short moment everything in Zephaniah's vision materialised; it was indeed a "Silent and Holy Night".

Thirty-three years after the joy of this night, that perfect child, had grown to become the adult victim that becomes both the Sacrament of Salvation and the founder of the Church of Love, the New Holy Family where the vision of Zephanaiah lives with Jesus, Mary and John and where when we choose it as our home "none shall make us afraid". Amen.