By Beth DeCristofaro
As Jesus drew near Jerusalem, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If this day you only knew what makes for peace– but now it is hidden from your eyes. (Luke 19:41-42)
Piety
Lord Jesus, as you weep for Jerusalem I pray with St. Elizabeth and recommit
my life to building up your Kingdom. "How could I bear a crown of gold when the Lord bears a crown of thorns? And bears it for me!” (Elizabeth of Hungary)
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| "The Charity of St. Elizabeth of Hungary" by Edmund Blair Leighton |
Study
It’s beginning to look a lot like super-consumer season. First, the bright oranges and black spider legs of Halloween, as much a play day for adults as for children. Morphing into reds, browns, feathers and gourds we now prepare for Thanksgiving. Articles recite an overabundance of the best ways to roast/poach/modernize the trending vegetable. However, overlapping all of this are the suddenly ubiquitous reds, greens, and golds of Christmas. It’s a little dizzying. More than a few people have used the phrase “snuck up on me” as in “how is it already Thanksgiving?” or “where did the year go?”
Contrast Jesus’ words on his journey to the end of his year. He weeps. While our seasons march toward the miraculous birth of a baby heralded by angels, kings, and shepherds, Jesus sees the destruction of a world order. However, it has not snuck up on him.
Jesus is so very deliberate, so very accepting of God’s will that even in his lament is the very real awareness and the full embodiment of God’s grace in motion, God’s Kingdom bursting into the world through his very person. In truthfully accepting God’s will we, too, experience moments of lamentation as we let go or knock down the castles we have focused on and the attitudes, habits, preconceptions which we hold priceless. Placing God truly at our core calls for accommodations within ourselves which have echoes in the end-time images of Advent. The destruction of Jerusalem, of an ending world, are merely, in God’s plan, the birth throes of the Kingdom in which God’s ideal Jerusalem and the perfect world will be born.
Action
We can be people of hope, aware that as Jesus with full mindfulness moves toward destruction He will bring about resurrection and thus blow open death’s doors for us. With that promise already fulfilled as our legacy, how can I today and each day of our holy days’ season – as did the tireless and generous St Elizabeth - do what is right, do what is loving, and build God’s kingdom in my own small but eternal way?
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