“Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus”: The Joy of Advent
© Rev. Fr. Dr. Bede Ukwuije, C.S.Sp.
With this development, the church retrieved the meaning of the word adventus, which was already used in the ancient writings, especially the Vulgate to express the coming of Christ among us both in flesh, which inaugurates the messianic time and in glory which will accomplish the redemption of time. In his Catecheses, St Cyril of
The organisation of the liturgy of Advent demonstrates the joyful expectation of the coming of the Lord. The prophetic texts that are read are inspired by the hope in the coming of the Messiah who will wipe out the tears of the people of God and set them free from oppression. Prophets Isaiah and John the Baptist are like the town criers echoing this joyful hope. Other prophets, like Jeremiah, Baruch and Zephaniah add their own voices also. In the communion antiphon of Second Sunday of Advent, the prophet Baruch calls on
The four weeks of Advent are divided into two stages. The first stage from 1-16 December recalls the twofold coming of Christ. The second from 17-24 December celebrates Christ himself. These two stages underline the fact that God’s promises to his people, announced by the prophets, are accomplished in Christ. The readings insist on the coming of Christ which will be a day of salvation for all peoples, a day of joy for all those who have waited in hope. If the Gloria is suppressed during this period, it is not for us to fall into sadness but it is in order that we may rediscover it at Christmas in the mouths of the angels of God.
How can we celebrate this joyful waiting of the coming of the Lord in a confused world? I cannot take the leisure to enumerate all the problems men and women experience in
We are called to be heralds of hope. The greatest service that Christians can render to our society is to repeat in season and out of season that life is possible even when everything seems to go wrong. Christians cannot take part in the ongoing collective depression. In the footsteps of Isaiah and John the Baptist we must rebuild hope in the minds and hearts of people. We must invite our contemporaries to contemplate the actions of God in the salvation history; how God makes life spring up in the desert of hopelessness. This of course goes together with a radical transformation of our ways of life, which the Gospel calls repentance.
Christian hope grounded in the event of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ attests that our future depends on God. Our history is woven by the gift of God welcomed and celebrated in faith. Christian hope is solidly anchored on the certainty that God never ceases to make all things new (Apocalypse 21, 1-7). He did it in the life of his Son, Jesus Christ; he does it today and will do it tomorrow. What is required from us is to allow ourselves to be mobilised by God.
As we shout the joyful song, “Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus”, we need to ask ourselves these questions: are we open to welcome the new things God does in our lives? Are we ready to allow God to renew the world in Jesus Christ, our future? Are we ready to make ourselves available so that God may use us to transmit his surprises to our society? Our response to these questions will determine the possibility of our being heralds of hope in the deserts of the human family held hostage by violence and despair. Our response to these questions will determine our capacity to welcome the God of life who comes in the daily events of our life.
Since people began to see signs of this shortage of priestly vocation, fervent prayers have continuously been offered to the Lord of the harvest asking him to send more labourers to the plentiful harvest.
What is happening in Africa today particularly in Nigeria tells me that the Lord is answering our prayers perhaps in a way that we did not expect. There are so many men with promising future who are responding to the call to become priests and even missionary priests for that matter.
In the Spiritan Province of Nigeria, to which I belong, there are over eight hundred (800) applications every year of people who want to become priests. We are just one out of many other religious orders in the country. These do not include the vocations in the fifty dioceses in Nigeria that send their candidates to the various major seminaries spread across the country. Some of these young men who apply to become priests hold professional degrees from renowned universities in the nation. How could one explain this except that it is the Lord?s doing?
Sometimes we find voices which attribute this teeming vocation in parts of Africa to the economic hardship prevalent in the continent. It is said that priesthood offers people the security of their daily bread and even affords them the opportunity of becoming like chiefs in their clans.
If this is the case, we still have reasons to thank God who can turn the situation of bad economy into blessings of abundant labourers for the harvest. However, I know places where economic misery has not been able to generate vocations as it is claimed to be the case in Africa.
Besides, I am one of those who believe that the authenticity of a vocation does not depend on how it was started, the initial intention or motivation. If this were the case, then I would say that none of the apostles of Jesus had an authentic vocation. Each of them followed Jesus because of an anticipated material gain.
Jesus was not bordered by their initial intentions. Through the process of formation given to them by Jesus which culminated in the eventual descent of the Holy Spirit on them, those self-seeking men of Galilee abandoned their initial aspirations and took up the mission of Jesus. Thus, I believe that the onus is on the Church and its systems of training future priests today to produce the best out of the many people that the Lord is sending to her through Africa.
It would be nice if every Christian begins to see the vocations coming from Africa (and of course from other places like Asia) as a blessing meant for the universal Church. Sometimes in the past such blessings came from Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and France. Today, the Lord is doing it from Africa.
Thus, in order to match quality with quantity, so much has to be done in terms of training or formation of future priests. Everybody needs to get involved in different ways to make this blessing a blessing indeed.
As we rejoice and thank the Lord for answering our prayers for more labourers, let us join hands together to make out the best from this for the good of the Church and humanity.
In the meantime, the challenges facing the Church with regard to the overwhelming growth of vocations in Africa are enormous. For us Spiritans in Nigeria, for example, we do not have adequate accommodations, classrooms, water, electricity supply and formators to accompany the seminarians in training. The assistance we get from our General headquarters in Rome cannot go so far. We get some support locally from benefactors and benefactresses. Yet, sometimes, we have found ourselves having to close down the seminary or go on vacation earlier than planned because we did not have enough resources to keep the seminary running.
How Can We Help the Seminary?
There are many ways you can get involved or help to boost vocations:
- First is through prayer. Daily prayers and Masses for the seminarians and for the priests training them would be highly appreciated.
- Second, you can adopt a seminarian or make contributions for their training. It will be a good idea if you can singly or together with others offer the world the gift of a priest in your life time. How else would the will of God for more labourers be fulfilled except in this way? It takes about N300,000.00 or US$3000.00 to train a seminarian in a year.
- Third, one can help to train somebody who would become a trainer of priests. More priests are needed in the seminary and they need specialized training in order to fulfill this role effectively. Would you like to contribute to the training of such priest-trainers?
- Fourth, you can us to put some basic infrastructure in place in the seminary such as a school bus, a kitchen, a hostels, computers or photocopiers.
- Fifth, your diocese, parish or association can adopt a seminary like ours in Africa. In that way you should share more closely in the life and formation of future priests and missionaries.
- In all, the formation of priests remains a very serious challenge for the Church today. A lot of praying has to be combined with hard work to see that we give the world good and holy priests. This is what we do at SIST. Why not join us in doing this?
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