Coffee With God

Reflection: Luke 21: 25-28, 34-36

One who is in love knows that the person loved always comes back in thoughts, dreams, fantasies, and conversations. To believe in Christ means to fall in love with him. He does not abandon us. In the year “C,” evangelist Luke highlights Jesus’ tenderness toward the least, the marginalized, the excluded and the sinners. Today is the First Sunday of the season of Advent. The word Advent referred to the visit of a king to a city or the day of the king’s coronation. The Christians adopted this practice to indicate the period of preparation for the visit of God who manifested himself in Jesus. It might be our experience that we expect a friend’s visit and wait for his arrival in the wrong bus station or terminal or we miss the time of the appointment and are not able to meet him. It also happens with God. He has already come many times in human history. He showed the place where he can be met, but perhaps we have not understood well because we end up waiting for him where he does not come. Advent is a time that helps us prepare well to receive the Lord into our lives. Today’s Gospel gives us some dramatic expressions of something that would occur. We could easily mistake it for some predictions that Jesus is giving in advance about what will happen at the end of the world. But that is not the meaning of the text. The apocalyptic images used by Jesus does not refer to explosions of stars, to catastrophic collisions of stars and planets. They speak of what is happening today. It becomes impossible to live in our world. People commit abuses and injustices; hate reigns; there is violence, war, inhumane conditions. Nature herself is destroyed by the exploitation of resources. Jesus does not intend to provoke fear, but to get just the opposite. He wants to free us from fear, inspire joy, and infuse hope. Today’s Gospel invites everyone “to lift the head.” There’s no chaos from which God cannot obtain a new and wonderful world. How to stay awake, alert, and ready to seize the moment and the place where the Lord is? It is very easy to get confused, deceived, waiting for him where he is not – that is: in our bad habits, our attachment to the goods and positions of this world. There is only one way to stay vigilant: to pray (v. 36). Prayer—Jesus says—will have two effects: it will give us the strength to see all the events in life with God’s eyes and it will ensure that we are not caught by fear. Prayer will make us ready to welcome him and go with him to the extent where he wants to lead us.