The Epistle to the Hebrews begins at once with the statement that God, who of old spoke to the fathers through the prophets in many fragmentary ways, has at the close of the pre-Messianic age spoken to us in his Son. We notice first that it is one and the same God who spoke both in the Old Covenant and in the New; when we join with the Church to confess the truth of the gospel concerning Jesus the Messiah, we are thereby confessing that the messianic hope of the Old Testament was a true hope. It is quite insufficient to say that the prophecies which express that hope are religiously valuable. It is necessary to affirm that God was preparing a messianic kingdom, and that the prophets were right in looking for such a kingdom, to be established by his act.
We notice secondly that he is said to have spoken by the prophets, in many fragments and in many modes. It was not only that different prophets had different styles, and that God also spoke through laws and rites and liturgical poems; but that the visions conveyed by these various modes were fragmentary and incomplete. Thus Isaiah saw one vision, and Ezekiel another, and there was the testimony both of the sacrificial rituals and of the prophets’ criticisms of sacrifice. It is only in the Son of God that there is an integral embodiment of the messianic idea, so that it can be seen as a whole; he who fulfils the messianic expectation gathers up all the strands in one. From a survey of the Old Testament alone it would be impossible to produce a satisfactory statement of the messianic idea, since it would be impossible to know certainly which elements in it were primary and which secondary, and it is not till the fulfilment has come that the various elements fall into place.
Thus the Old Testament is at once the word of God and not the final word of God. It is an imperfect, provisional, preparatory covenant, needing to be made complete in the Messiah. It represents a stage in the education of the people of God.
Friday after Advent 3
A Reading from the Meditations of Richard Challoner
In the office appointed for this holy time, the Church frequently puts us in mind of the mission and preaching of St John the Baptist, and of the manner in which he endeavoured to prepare the people for Christ; to the end that we may learn from the doctrine of this great forerunner of our Lord, in what dispositions we ought also to be if we would duly prepare the way for him. Now what the Baptist continually preached to the people was: that they should turn from their evil ways, and do penance, because the kingdom of heaven was at hand; that they should bring forth fruits worthy of penance, if they would escape the wrath to come–and this without delay – for that now the axe was laid at the root of the tree, and that every tree that did not bring forth good fruit should be cut up and cast into the fire. That they should not flatter themselves with the expectation of impunity or security, because they had Abraham for their father; for that God was able to raise up from the very stones children to Abraham; and therefore without a thorough conversion from their sins, they were to expect that the kingdom of God, and the grace and dignity of being children of Abraham (the father of all the faithful) should be taken away from them and given to the Gentiles. He added, that he baptized them indeed with water unto penance; but that another should come after him that should ‘baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire; that his fan was in his hand, and that he should thoroughly cleanse his floor, and gather his wheat into the barn; but the chaff he would burn with unquenchable fire’. This was the way St John prepared the people for Christ; and it is by conforming ourselves in practice to these his lessons at this holy time, that we must also prepare the way of the Lord, and be prepared for him.
Christians, this is our great business at this holy time, if we hope to prepare ourselves for Christ; this is the proper exercise for it – to pass over in our mind in the bitterness of our soul, all our years that have been spent in sin; to bewail and lament every day of this holy season, all our past treasons against the divine majesty; to turn now to God with our whole heart; to offer our whole souls to him; to exercise ourselves in his love, and to enter into new articles with him of an eternal allegiance, with a full determination of rather dying than being any more disloyal to him; and letting not one day pass without offering him some penitential satisfaction for our past guilt, to be united to and sanctified by the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. O how happy are they that employ the time of Advent in this manner! O how willingly will our Lord, at the approaching Christmas, communicate himself to such souls as these!
Saturday after Advent 3
A Reading from the treatise The City of God by Augustine
After recalling the great promise of God to David and the assurances by which he so strongly confirmed it, the psalmist feared that people might think this promise was fulfilled in Solomon. To counter this hope and the disillusion that it would give rise to, he continues: ‘Yet you, O Lord, have rejected and spurned your Anointed.’
What is being referred to here is what happened to Solomon’s kingdom in his successors, down to the devastation of the earthly Jerusalem which was the capital of his kingdom, and especially down to the destruction of the very temple that Solomon had built. But lest anyone might think that God had been unfaithful to his promises, the psalmist immediately adds: ‘You have postponed the coming of your Anointed.’ If the coming of the Anointed of the Lord has been postponed, he cannot therefore be identified with Solomon or even with David himself.
It is indeed true that all the kings of the Jews, who were anointed with the mystic chrism, were called the anointed of the Lord. Not only David and his successors were thus described, but Saul also who was the first to be anointed as king of the people of the Jews and whom David himself called the Lord’s anointed.
There was, however, but one true Christ or ‘Anointed’, of whom David and his successors were but types by virtue of their prophetic anointing. In saying that his coming was postponed, the psalmist is merely speaking from the viewpoint of those who had identified him in their thoughts with David or Solomon, whereas according to the plan and preparations of God he was to come at his own proper time.
The psalm here continues with a narrative of what happened during the interval of this delay to the kingdom of the earthly Jerusalem where hope in the eventual reign of the Anointed One, promised by the Lord, was kept alive and strong: ‘You have renounced the covenant with your servant, and defiled his crown in the dust. You have broken down all his walls; you have laid his strongholds desolate. All who pass by the way have plundered him; he is made the reproach of his neighbours. You have exalted the right hands of his foes, you have gladdened all his enemies. You have turned back his sharp sword and have not sustained him in battle. You have deprived him of his lustre and hurled his throne to the ground. You have shortened the days of his youth; you have covered him with shame.’
All these misfortunes were visited upon the enslaved Jerusalem, though some of her kings reigned as heirs of the free Jerusalem from on high; they regarded their office as a role in a divine dispensation that was temporary and preparatory; they believed with a true faith that God would eventually establish the kingdom of the heavenly Jerusalem, of which they were heirs; and they placed all their hope in the one true Christ, who was to come.
Fourth Sunday of Advent
A Reading from a treatise Against Heresies by Irenaeus
The Lord came into his own creation in a visible way: his own creation sustained him who sustains everything in being. His obedience on the tree of the cross reversed the disobedience at the tree in Eden; the good news of the truth announced by an angel to Mary, a virgin who was shortly to be married, undid the evil lie that had seduced Eve, a virgin also espoused to a husband.
Just as Eve was seduced by the word of an angel and fled from God after disobeying his word, so Mary in her turn welcomed the good news by the word of an angel that she should sustain God in obedience to his word. As Eve was seduced into disobeying God, so Mary
