The First Monday of Advent
It is the advent of Advent—the beginning of the beginning. We have entered a new liturgical year (B, if you’ve not been keeping track) and, with that, have before us the opportunity for an invigorating period of spiritual reflection, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

While Lent understandably infuses more somber undertones into our reflections, Advent parallels the other purple liturgical season in that we are encouraged to embrace the knowledge of our brokenness, our faults, our fallibility, as we await He Who is complete, perfect, infallible.

The first reading today describes the Lord’s house as a wondrous mountain, more glorious and abundant with knowledge than any earthly nation. With His death on the cross, God granted us access to the pathway leading us to this very kingdom. However, had the Lord Jesus not been born as an infant to live and die for our sins, our chances of entering this kingdom would be next to zero—it is, after all, atop the highest mountain, hard to get to on our own. The Responsorial Psalm invites us to not just appreciate, but rejoice in the incredibility of our future residence in the house of the Lord. We now have access to this amazing place through the mercy of the Lord!

It is logical, then, to consider the apparent ludicrousness of inviting the Lord to our own homes. We could not possibly offer a place of comparable peace and perfection, even slightly worthy for the Lord’s presence!

Yet, every single week at Mass, we accept the Lord not simply to our homes, but into our bodies in our consumption of the Eucharist. To remind us of how extremely fortunate we are, that God Himself would allow us to bring His own flesh into our bodies, as imperfect as we are, as pale our selves may be in comparison to the glorious inhabitance into which God invites us, we borrow every week the words of the centurion in today’s Gospel: “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Despite the context of the passage being slightly different from Mass (the centurion acknowledges that his servant shall be healed, not his soul), the sentiment remains: God’s ultimate power and Kingdom vastly outshine anything we could possibly offer, yet He calls us there nonetheless. He desires that we join Him at the heavenly banquet, and our faith, proven in our humble obedience to His majesty, united with His sacrifice for us, allows us entry.

By taking the time to recognize our unworthiness as the centurion did, we may more fully rejoice in the remarkable gift of our invitation to the Lord’s house.