God our savior is coming
The antiphon of the evening prayer of the Advent Season re-echoes the entire liturgical year. Let us listen to it again: “Proclaim to the peoples: God our Savior is coming”.
At the beginning of Advent, the liturgy invites the church to renew her proclamation to all the peoples and sums it up in two words “God comes”. These words, so concise, contain an ever new evocative power. Let us pause a moment to reflect: it is not used in the past tense — God has come, — nor in the future — God will come, — but in the present: “God comes”.
At a closer look, this is a continuous present, that is, an ever-continuous action: it happened, it is happening now and it will happen again. In whichever moment, “God comes”. The verb “to come” appears here as a theological verb, indeed theological, since it says something about God’s very nature. Proclaiming that “God comes” is equivalent, therefore, to simply announcing God himself, through one of his essential and qualifying features: his being the God-who-comes.
Advent calls us to become aware of this truth and to act accordingly. It rings out as a salutary appeal in the days, weeks and months that repeat: Awaken! Remember that God comes! Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now!
The one true God, “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”, is not a God who is there in Heaven, unconcerned with us and our history, but he is the-God-who-comes. He is a Father who never stops thinking of us and, in the extreme respect of our freedom, desires to meet us and visit us; he wants to come, to dwell among us, to stay with us. His “coming” is motivated by the desire to free us from evil and death, from all that prevents our true happiness. God comes to save us.
With Christmas approaching, the dominant note instead is on the commemoration of the event at Bethlehem, so that we may recognize it as the “fullness of time”.
The archetype for that coming of Christ, which we might call a “spiritual incarnation”, is always Mary. Just as the Virgin Mother pondered in her heart on the Word made flesh, so every individual soul and the entire Church are called during their earthly pilgrimage to wait for Christ who comes and to welcome him with faith and love ever new. Let us therefore begin this new Advent — a time granted to us by the Lord of time — by reawakening in our hearts the expectation of the God-who-comes and the hope that his Name will be hallowed, that his Kingdom of justice and peace will come, that his will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Let us allow the Virgin Mary, Mother of the God-who-comes and Mother of Hope, to guide us in this waiting. May she intercede for us that we be found holy and immaculate in love at the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be praise and glory for ever and ever. Amen
