Below is the first part of an Advent Reflection by Fr Kevin O’Gorman. Part two will be published next Sunday.
October 4th this year marked the 60th anniversary of Pope Saint Paul VI’s historic address to the United Nations where he proclaimed his protest and plea, his prophecy and prayer to put an end to war(s) on earth, putting it ‘first of all negatively. These are the words you are looking for us to say and the words we cannot utter without feeling aware of their seriousness and solemnity: never again one against the other, never, never again!’, repeating this later ‘never again war, never again war!’ Sadly, over sixty years later our screens, on televisions and digital devices, again and again show us the awful effects of wars around the world.
Today the call for an end to war is not confined to battlefields. Another war is being waged around the globe, not with weapons but with words, the war against truth. Globalisation has given birth to the capacity to communicate almost anywhere, anytime. Tragically such global media can generate lying at any level, individual or institutional, leading to a loss of truth. So-called ‘alternative facts’ erode confidence in communications, both interpersonal and international. In an age with an unrivalled access to and amount of media, both personal and professional, the challenge to truth is unprecedented with the risk of reducing trust to transactional affairs, with the danger of even former friendship and other relationships being reduced to deal-making. Transactions deal with things; truth testifies to respect for other people, recognising their equal and transcendent dignity as persons. There is no justice without truth-telling; there is no peace among peoples without trust.
Advent is the season for hoping in the truth of God’s Word, a word of justice and peace proclaimed by the prophets of the Old Testament. For them the link between faith and justice was indivisible: ‘The prophets as a movement were the social conscience of Israel. They attacked the rich’s exploitation of the poor because Yahweh’s covenant demanded not sacrifice but interhuman justice’.[1] The promise of justice will be delivered by the coming of the new shoot in the line of David: ‘A branch will spring from the stock of Jesse, a shoot will grow from his roots. On him will rest the spirit of the Lord, the spirit of wisdom and insight, the spirit of counsel and power, the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord: his delight will be in fear of the Lord. His judgement will not be by appearances, his verdict not given on hearsay. He will judge the weak with righteousness and give fair sentence for the poor of the land’.(Isaiah 11:1-4)[2]
While making just demands on the people of God in the present, the prophet foretold a period of messianic peace: ‘The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, calf, lion and fat-stock beast together, with a little boy to lead them. The cow and the bear will graze, their young will lie down together. The lion will eat hay like the ox. The infant will play over the hole of the adder; the baby will put its hand into the viper’s lair. No hurt, no harm will be done on all my holy mountain, for the land will be full of knowledge of the Lord’. (Isaiah 11:6-9). Thus true ‘knowledge of the Lord’ knits together faith and justice, love of God and neighbour.
Fr Kevin O’Gorman SMA
[1] L. John Topel, The Way to Peace – Liberation through the Bible, Dublin; Gill & MacMillan, 1980, 68.
[2] This and subsequent scriptural texts are taken from New Revised Jerusalem Bible.