This year, the fourth week of Advent was very short, but it
wasn’t as short as it could have been.
There are years when the fourth Sunday of Advent is also Christmas Eve,
so the fourth week of Advent ends up being only a few short hours long. Nevertheless, the fourth week of Advent has
its own special theme for focusing our prayer:
Love. And how appropriate is it
that in the last hours or days before Christmas, we focus on the virtue that
Jesus Christ embodies as fully human and fully divine?
Jesus Christ, true God and true man, is love incarnate, love
made flesh. He is the fulfillment of God
the Father’s love for humankind. The
oft-referenced verse, John 3:16, tells us “For God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but
might have eternal life” (NABRE translation).
Jesus shows us how to love more perfectly. He teaches us that we are to love those
around us (our “neighbors”) and he gives us a model of how to love them. At Christmas, we recall Jesus’ first coming
at his birth in Bethlehem. Now, invite
him to come again, into your heart to perfect how you love others, and ask him
to help you love more perfectly.
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