Jesus’ prayer reminds us that we need the simplicity and the openness of the child to receive all that God is offering us. In his prayer Jesus blesses or praises God for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom to mere children, while hiding them from the learned and the clever. His prayer was inspired by the Holy Spirit, ‘filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said.’ All true prayer is inspired and shaped by the Holy Spirit. At the beginning of the first week of Advent with its call to prayer, this morning’s gospel reading puts before us an example of the prayer of Jesus. In Advent we enter into the spirit of Mary’s prayerful waiting for her son to be born, a prayerful waiting that found a special expression in her great prayer the Magnificat. We ask the Lord to be born within our lives, so that we might worthily celebration the feast of Christ’s birth to Mary and Joseph. In that prayer we invite the Lord to come into our lives more fully. The great Advent prayer is ‘Come Lord Jesus’. All the gifts we might receive in the next four weeks pale into insignificance alongside this great gift.Īdvent is a season of prayerful waiting for the coming of the Lord. It is a gift, God’s gift we have done nothing to earn it. As we prepare this Advent to celebrate the birth of Jesus, we might take a moment to give thanks to God for the gift of our Christian faith. We may not have seen and heard Jesus in the way that his first disciples did, but we have seen and heard him in and through the gospels, in and through the church. We are fortunate to have seen and heard what Isaiah and others like him could only hope for. That person was Jesus and in this morning’s gospel reading he prays to God in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the first reading today Isaiah looks forward to a descendant of Jesse, the father of David, on whom the Holy Spirit of God would rest in abundance. Jesus declares us blessed because we have come to see and hear what prophets and kings during the history of the people of Israel wanted to see and hear but never did. This morning’s gospel reading contains a beatitude, one that is addressed to all of us, ‘Happy the eyes that see what you see’. However they are not the only beatitudes in the gospel. When we hear the term Beatitudes we probably think first of the ten Beatitudes from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount that are well known to us. That is our Advent calling, to see the Lord more deeply, to listen to him more attentively, so that we can witness to him more fully. We become more like the one we see and hear, so that we can bring him to others. As we see more clearly and hear more attentively, we open ourselves to being changed by what we see and hear. It is an opportunity to listen more attentively to what God has said to us and is saying to us through Jesus and to see more deeply into the mystery of God present in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Advent is a season to grow in our appreciation of the way God has blessed us through the sending of his Son to us. Rightly Jesus says to us, ‘Happy or blessed are you’. There is a privilege involved in this, because as Jesus says the prophets and kings of Israel wanted to see what we see and never saw it to hear what we hear and never heard it. We have come to recognize the face of God in Jesus and to hear the word of God in what Jesus says. Jesus has revealed God to us and we have responded in faith, with our eyes and ears. Jesus says in that gospel reading, ‘no one knows who… the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son choses to reveal him’. Jesus declares us blessed because we have seen him with the eyes of faith and heard him with the ears of faith and in seeing and hearing Jesus we have seen and heard God. There is a striking beatitude at the beginning of today’s gospel reading, ‘Happy the eyes that see what you see…’ It is a beatitude that embraces us all.
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