November 30, 2025 First Sunday of Advent

Welcome Father Loice Today’s Readings: Is 2:1-5 | Rom 13:11-14 | Mt 24:37-44

####Swords Into Plowshares

[…This] First Sunday of Advent begins another Church Year in the third millennium CE. The start of this millennium simply served to remind us what the season of Advent has always been about in the eyes of faith: the year 2000 was simply a special jubilee year, doing what jubilee years have always done. It marked a special anniversary of the incarnation, celebrating the new beginning signaled by the First Advent of Christ, and occasioning repentance and renewed commitment to the good work that God has begun among us in Jesus.

Advent has always been a miniature of such anniversary jubilees. During this time, we focus our prayer and our liturgy on how we, and the rest of the world, continue to hunger for the dream that the incarnation began to realize two millennia ago. The language for expressing the hope — that the first Advent started to implement — was supplied in great part by the authors of the scroll of Isaiah.

This Sunday’s First Reading gives us one of the most powerful articulations of that hope. If you visit the Old City of Jerusalem and stand on the Temple Mount and look around, the imagery of this reading takes on the dramatic edge it was meant to have. You find yourself standing on the hill the Bible calls Zion. It is a conspicuous shoulder of earth, to be sure, but it is noticeably lower than the mountains and hills surrounding it.

So when you read, “In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills,” you know that you are reading an apocalyptic vision. That is, you are reading a description of an event that is not of human making. It is a work of “earth-shaking” proportions brought about by divine intervention. Further, this vision of the end-times pictures all nations acknowledging Yahweh as the one God and king of all. They are streaming to Zion to learn Torah as a means of living in international peace. People will be moved to turn instruments of war, like swords and spears, into implements of peace, like agricultural tools such as plowshares and pruning hooks. (It is poignant to read that vision now, when rival political claimants to present-day Zion are threatening violence to make Jerusalem a place of shalom.)

That Jesus and the early Christians took this vision seriously is clear from the New Testament. Jesus called his followers “the light of the world.” He compared them to a city on a hill whose lights are visible for miles around. He blessed the makers of peace and challenged his disciples to find nonviolent ways of responding to violence. He even went so far as to advocate loving one’s enemies and praying for one’s persecutors. If this sounds like raising Zion above the surrounding landscape (moving mountains), that is as it should be. Such peacemaking is, finally, not something people do on their own. It is something that God does with and through them.

Advent comes to remind us that what the human heart most deeply desires, God began to fulfill in the first Advent — the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. And what God has begun in Christ Jesus, God will complete — if those touched by this good news allow themselves to be used for such apocalyptic (read “humanly unrealistic but divinely possible”) peacemaking.

Source of reflection: © 2001, Dennis Hamm, SJ, https://liturgy.sluhostedsites.org/1AdvA113025/theword_hamm.html Source of image: https://pixabay.com/en/first-advent-christmas-advent-160890/, via https://www.liturgytools.net

News

  • 30 November - For all kids and young people interested in joining the altar server ministry, we will have a training session before Mass (11:30-12:30). We will also consider the small changes in the Liturgy that are coming up in Advent so that we are well prepared.
  • 30 November - For our International Caroling that comes off Dec 14, after Mass, we are still looking for musical contributions. Kindly let us know asap if you, your family, or a group of friends from the community would like to contribute an Advent/ Christmas song to the list!
  • 7 December - Our December “Social Sunday” with Children’s Church and social gathering - add it to your agenda, and start thinking about what contribution you can make to the buffet :)