19th December - O Root of Jesse

Advent is a season of tending life and a season of becoming. That God who ’is’, who only is - who has no ‘was’, who has no ‘will be’ - now, in the Incarnation is becoming God is doing something that as God He could not do: He could not change, He could not grow, He could not become. He is the ‘is-ness’ that is the heart of being.

Now choosing to become Incarnate, God, as man,bcan become. Because God loves the world so much...

The Incarnation of God took place in a true man of flesh and blood with a human ancestry. We could go on tracing the family tree through many generation of Jewish people. The human heredity of Jesus is the instrument of God’s Incarnation. But Christ is not  only the product of Israel’s history, but also its source and origin. In the Book of Revelation (22.16) Jesus says 'I am the root and offspring of David’. Christ is both son of David and also his Lord. Just as Christ, the eternal Word and the One through whom the universe was made, became part of his own creation, so he who is the fruit of the chosen people is also the root from which that people derived its life.  

Among the ancestors of Jesus, we can mention wonderful figures such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Zerubbabel… The truth is that in such a large group there were also  wicked– Rehoboam, the foolish son of the wise Solomon, who caused the disintegration of the Kingdom of Israel… Ahaz, who killed his own son in a sacrifice… There were also those, such as Kings David and Manasseh, who, although they committed sins, were able to enter the path of conversion...

One can also read the genealogy according to St. Matthew as a kind of map of every soul: in every person there are good and bad places, those of which a person can be proud and those of which he does not have to be proud. And the Son of God, being born as a man, touches every soul and heals what is bad so that it can now serve the Lord God.

This is a great encouragement and hope for us – no matter how twisted the fate of my family, how complicated the history of my ancestors, I can still write it anew with beautiful syllables of decisions made. Let us not be fooled by the illusion of determination, but let us take life into our own hands and entrust it to God, and then we can bring forth good fruits.

Pope Francis in his Wednesday catechesis says, hope is a virtue against which we often sin: in our unsettling nostalgias, in our melancholies, when we think that the joys of the past are buried forever, or when we are overwhelmed by our sins and forget that God’s mercy is infinite. Today, the world  is in great need of hope. He also writes that it is necessary to pay attention to the considerable good that exists in the world, so as not to fall into the temptation of thinking we are overcome by evil and violence. The signs of the time in essence ’want to be transformed into signs of hope’.

This leads us to develops a virtue closely related to hope: patience. We have become accustomed to wanting everything immediately in a world were haste has become constant, notes Pope Francis. ’We no longer have time to meet each other, and often even in families, it becomes difficult to come together and speak calmly. Patience has been driven away by haste, causing significant harm to people. In the internet age, where space and time are supplanted by the here and now patience is no longer at home.

If we were still capable of looking at creation with wonder, we could understand how decisive patience is. It is a fruit of the Holy Spirit,keeping hope alive and consolidating it as a virtue and way of life.

Reflecting on the new Christmas tree ,Pope Francis highlighted its deeper spiritual meaning: ’With its interwoven old and young branches reaching skyward, it serves as a powerful metaphor for the Church, a people and a body through which the light of Christ spreads into the world, thanks to the succession of generations of believers united around a single source: JESUS’.