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On the 1st Sunday of Advent it was the Church’s duty, which as a good Mother she fulfilled, to urge us to do penance in view of the end times and judgement at the Second Coming. This week she points to the joy that awaits us after penance and judgement, encapsulated in “Jerusalem”. We are being directed to “Jerusalem”.
What is “Jerusalem” for us this Sunday and in this season? It’s a place and a state and a hope.
Our Roman forebears and contemporaries have at their disposal their own “Jerusalem” in the great Basilica Sessoriana, also known as Holy Cross in Jerusalem. This is where there were deposited the holy relics of the Passion and soil from Calvary which the Empress St. Helena brought back from the earthly Jerusalem. This is the Roman Station Church for this 2nd Sunday of Advent. St. John Henry Newman wrote of the Roman Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem,
If there be a centre of the Church, we shall be there, when we are on earth from Jerusalem in the midst of Rome.
The chants of the Mass on this 2nd Sunday of Advent in the Vetus Ordo sing of Jerusalem. In the Introit, we have
Populus Sion, ecce, Dominus veniet… People of Zion, behold, the Lord shall come to save the nations; and the Lord shall make the glory of His voice to be heard, in the joy of the heart.
“Zion” is not only used for the land of Israel as a whole, it is a reference specifically to a hill in Jerusalem, Mount Zion. It became a shorthand reference for Jerusalem.
In the Gradual we hear, “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth.” The Latin in that last part about how He will come is “Deus manifeste veniet”.
Christ won’t come in the small still voice, or a rustle of the breeze. Nor will He be in the sad glance of a person who needs mercy, the eloquence of Holy Writ, or the gentle touch of the Eucharistic Host. I like the great Johnny Cash song “The Man Comes Around”, one of the last things he wrote before his death in 2003:
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singin’
Multitudes are marchin’ to the big kettledrum
Voices callin’, voices cryin’
Some are born and some are dyin’
It’s Alpha and Omega’s kingdom come
Johnny massively underestimated the number of angels.
That adverb manifeste is a big deal. In Latin, manifestus derives from manus (“hand”) and fendo, the basis of defendo, offendo. It’s core meaning is “hits with the hand”. The adverb manifeste means “slap in the face obvious”.
The Communion antiphon is from Baruch 5:5 and 4:36: “Up, Jerusalem! stand upon the heights; and behold the joy that comes to you from your God.” Let’s see all of Baruch 5:5:
Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height
and look toward the east,
and see your children gathered from west and east,
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them.
The prophet seems to advocate that the priest and people “upon the height”, that is in the church, together face to the East for the Coming of the Lord in the Eucharist.
Circling back, we are closer to answer “What is ‘Jerusalem’ for us today and in this season?” It was the holy city which God desired to be founded so as to bring the People to worship Him properly. When we worship properly, for example, reverently according to the traditional and recognizable rite of the Roman Church, we are morally present in the “center of the Church”, as St. John Newman described. In the Church Christ founded, we are already in “Jerusalem”. We are therefore morally present, if not physically, together with all the faithful in the Jerusalem of the past, where Our Lord established the Eucharist, suffered His Passion and Death, and then His Resurrection. We are, moreover, enwrapped in a fore-glimpse of the Heavenly Jerusalem yet to come. This Jerusalem will come down from Heaven, like the Lord Himself, in glory. As ancient Jerusalem was the focal point of pilgrimages, as it is today to some extent, we as pilgrims on the march are bound for the Heavenly Jerusalem. In our sacred liturgical rites, especially through the sacraments, we open ourselves to God to bring that Heavenly Jerusalem already into our souls, ever more orderly, ever more beautiful, ever more ready to receive Him.
In Advent we prepare for the Coming of the King, simultaneously at Christmas, looking to our hallowed past, and in the Parousia, anticipating our inevitable future. Therefore, we begin to hear from the herald and forerunning of the Messiah to be born by the Virgin in humility and to be borne by the glory cloud in majesty. St. John the Baptist heralded the first Coming by leaping in the womb at the physical proximity of the Word made flesh. Now Holy Mother the Church holds him high so that he can repeat his earthly shout in our sacramental reality of the sacred liturgy: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths; let every valley be filled, every hill leveled.” In fact, when the Lord comes, He will come by the straight path, for in that day of days, nothing will withstand Him. Only now are we able to place blocks and ditches and barriers to Him in the way He comes to us in this vale of tears. It behooves us to make everything ready as best we can. He will straighten things out whether we have done it aforehand or not.
May His coming truly be the moment of joy preannounced in the Introit. Penance was the Church’s advice last week. This week, in the Collect, we have added to that also good works. Let’s have a quick look at this beautiful oration:
Excita, Domine, corda nostra ad praeparandas Unigeniti tui vias; ut, per eius adventum, purificatis tibi mentibus servire mereamur.
This ancient prayer was in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries. That excito, is in the first place “to call out or forth, to wake or rouse up”. It is also, “to raise up, comfort; to awaken, enliven”. Praeparo, a compound of prae and paro, is “to make ready beforehand”. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus speaks of John with the words of Malachi: “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare (praeparabit) the way before thee”.
LITERAL VERSION:
Rouse up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the paths for Your Only-Begotten, so that through His Coming we may be worthy to serve You with minds made pure.
Can we take that “minds made pure” is a result of our having taken Holy Mother’s advice last week and we have since been to confession? Of course we can.
Of course that “serve you” means what it says. Get busy and “serve”.
In last week’s Collect, we asked God to rouse up His own might (Excita … potentiam tuam). This week we ask him to rouse us up, to stir up our hearts. Why? To comfort yes, but mainly to enliven and arouse. Last week in the Lesson we were told by Paul that it was time to awaken from sleep (cf. Rom 13). This week we ask the Father to make our hearts worthy paths (viae) for the feet of Our Lord by rousing and comforting them. Our hearts, our interior life (mens) must reflect His beauty. It must be prepared beforehand to receive Him when He comes howsoever He comes. In the Gradual the Church sings: “Out of Sion the loveliness of his beauty: God shall come manifestly (manifeste).” This “manifest” Coming is not only at the end of the world, in glory and might, as we hear Jesus describe on the 1st Sunday of Advent: it is also in the life of grace, which is manifest in our words and deeds.
In living that life now, through grace and elbow grease, we taste already something of our heavenly joy even in adversity.
