|
This summer I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and while I was there a Trappist monk showed some friends and me around the cemetery. He pointed out Thomas Merton’s grave, then took us to the oldest section. They’d run out of space, so they began digging up old graves and he said, "Guess what we found when we began excavating? Nothing! It was like Easter Sunday! Nothing was there! Resurrection! We return to dust!"
I can’t stop thinking about that monk’s joy—finding nothing, finding emptiness, finding resurrection.
And I can’t stop thinking about the Gospel passage for today and how we start off Advent with Jesus overturning tables in the temple. Jesus walks into God’s house and finds it’s been turned into a religious shopping mall. The poor are getting taken advantage of, and the entire system is rigged to keep the wealthy in power. So Jesus flips the tables.
This is who we’re waiting for in Advent. The Word made flesh who empties out our religious posturing. Who shows up and wrecks our carefully constructed systems.
Because we are no different. We turn grace into a commodity. We make church about who’s in and who’s out. We build barriers when Jesus came to tear them down.
Advent is about preparing for the one who disrupts us, who empties us out like those graves—leaving nothing but the promise of resurrection. Maybe this Advent we let Jesus wreck some stuff. We ask what tables need overturning. We let Jesus dismantle our systems rather than falsely use him to prop them up.
The one we’re waiting for isn’t tame. He empties. He disrupts. He resurrects.
| 
