YEAR OF SAINT PAUL                              By Sr. Mary Anne Schaenzer, SSND                                  Sixth in a series of Reflections on                                 the Life of Saint Paul                                 For the Jubilee Year of St. Paul                                 June 28, 2008-June 29, 2009

Paul and the Coming of the Lord

by: Mary Anne Schaenzer, SSND

Advent means coming.

Today we connect the word Advent with the word Christmas.

We read of the birth of Jesus in the letter of Paul to the Galatians 4:5.

It is put as simply as this:

When the fullness of time had come,

God sent his Son,

born of a woman,

born under the law,

to ransom those under the law,

so that we might receive adoption.

Raymond Brown in his book, The Birth of the Messiah, writes that the phrase “born of a woman” stresses “what Jesus shared with those whom he redeemed, precisely because it is applicable to everyone who walks this earth” (p. 519). He says that this is designed to underline the historicity of Jesus.

There is no mention of the birth of Christ in the Gospels of Mark or John. Raymond Brown writes that “In the early Christian preaching the birth of Jesus had not yet been seen in the same salvific light as the death and resurrection” (p. 28).

Paul does however make reference to the coming of the Lord as he writes of the second coming. In fact, though we celebrate the coming of Jesus as a baby we also look forward to the Second Coming. In the Apostles’ Creed we say, “He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.” We profess that in a similar way in the Nicene Creed. We also say that “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  This is also similar phrasing in both creeds. At Mass we often proclaim the acclamation: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

On December 14, the Third Sunday of Advent, we will read from 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, which exhorts us to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, not to quench the Spirit, not to despise prophetic utterances, but to test everything, retain what is good, and refrain from evil. Paul asks the God of peace to make us perfectly holy and that we may be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Earlier in the same chapter Paul tells us that we are children of the light and children of the day. We are not of night or of darkness. The difference for us is day and night. We are of the day. This is not the natural dawn that follows night but it is the “day of the Lord.” Fr. George Montague, in The Living Thought of St. Paul, stresses that we must be alert [as we so often hear during Advent] not because we do not know the day or the hour but because we are children of the day. In other words, we need to live like the children that we are – children of the day,

children of our heavenly Father.

During this December and this Advent, let us celebrate that Jesus became one of us so that we might be adopted children, made for day, “with the coming of Christ on the horizon of our thoughts” (p. 24).

 

© National Service Committee 2008