Christ Will Come Again: longing for a change
Many years ago, when I didn’t try to hide the fact that I regularly
read the comic strips in the newspaper, a staple of the first
page of the Chicago Tribune’s comics section was Dick Tracy. His
use of technological gadgets at the service of crime detection
prefigured James Bond’s antics in the sixties, but his personal
behavior was free of the sexual promiscuity associated with the
Bond character. Tracy’s only love was Tess Trueheart.
As important to the comics page as Dick Tracy was Al Capp’s Li’l
Abner. Of all the characters in Li’l Abner’s family and extended
family, his mother, Mammy Yokum, was a consistent source of reflection
on the actions of the other characters. Just as Dick Tracy’s use
of a two-way wrist radio foreshadowed gadgets to come, Mammy Yokum’s
adages prepared us for current attitudes. One of her often repeated
dictums was, “Good is better than evil, because it’s nicer.” Was
Mammy Yokum right? Is goodness judged by niceness?
It’s certainly easier to welcome “nice” people than people who
aren’t nice. Since we are trained to be nice ourselves, welcoming
other nice people doesn’t turn our world upside down. What then
are we to do with the Advent prayers? They have us praying for
the coming of Christ in glory and the definitive establishment
of his kingdom. The problem in welcoming Jesus is that the risen
Lord, who is the only Jesus there really is after the crucifixion,
is not exactly a “nice man”. The first words out of his mouth
are, “Do not be afraid.” Those who saw him were terrified before
they were consoled. If mothers saw him on the street, they would
probably instinctively clutch their children to themselves to
keep them safe from someone so obviously human yet now so very
different.
Advent is to prepare us for Christmas, when we see clearly that
God has become man, that the eternal Wisdom of God assumes human
nature and takes human flesh of the Virgin Mary, when Christian
humanism is born in the mystery of the Incarnation. It’s unsettling
that the Church prepares us by directing our gaze first to the
Pantocrator, the cosmic Christ who returns in glory to judge the
living and the dead. If it isn’t unsettling, if we don’t recognize
that the risen Christ isn’t “nice”, we haven’t understood what
we’re praying for in Advent and we can pray neither the Creed
nor the Our Father with complete integrity. In fact, the reluctance
of some Catholics today to pray both these prayers is, I would
suspect, implicit recognition that they force us into a world
not of our own making, peopled with characters who cannot be totally
assimilated into our contemporary worldview. A Jesus who is declared
a “sign of contradiction” (Luke 2:34) soon after his birth is
not what we instinctively think of when we’re looking for a role
model for toddlers.
Left to ourselves, we prefer niceness to goodness. We are tempted
to deny the miracle of Jesus’ birth by making him and it merely
representative symbols of a universal human experience: joy in
welcoming new life. That is always nice. The Church prevents this
reduction by showing us the meaning of this beginning in its end,
this birth’s culmination in Christ’s return in glory. Christmas
is not an exercise in nostalgia but a re-living of one dimension
of the mystery of the risen Christ: his birth from Mary, daughter
of Zion and ever-Virgin Mother of God. Celebrating Jesus’ birth
prepares us for Jesus’ return because Mary, like all mothers,
introduces her child to us and to all the world. She makes sure,
by her prayers now, that we’ll recognize him for who he is when
we welcome him at the end of time.
In the meantime, our time, we welcome Christ from within his body,
the Church. In the prayers of this Advent season, in the liturgy
of the Church, in our family and personal prayer, our hearts are
more and more conformed to his. Learning to welcome him in our
hearts moves us to desire that others do the same. Welcoming Christ
at the beginning of the new millennium is to be marked by a new
evangelization. I am truly grateful to all those who, especially
through using the Disciples in Mission program in our parishes,
are thinking through new ways of listening to others’ spiritual
journeys, pondering new words to introduce others to Jesus Christ,
planning new ways to welcome others in Christ’s name.
As we become an evangelizing people, much will change in our lives.
Even as we long for a change, we recognize that we don’t know
exactly how to bring it about. But neither did the apostles two
thousand years ago. What they knew very well, however, is that
neither they nor anyone else can simply use Jesus to make themselves
“nicer” people; when we surrender to Jesus he will transform us
into the people he wants us to be. That’s what we learn to long
for as we pray for Christ’s return in glory. God bless you.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I.
Archbishop of Chicago
