Catholic Preaching

Advent Fire, Second Saturday of Advent, December 13, 2025

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Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Church of St. Agnes, Manhattan
Advent Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum
Saturday of the Second Week of Advent
December 13, 2025
Sir 48:1-4.9-11, Ps 80, Mt 17:9-13

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

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The following text guided the homily: 

  • One of the most important things to grow in the practice of the Catholic faith is to help them understand the liturgy and its many liturgical symbols. During the Advent season, one of those symbols is the Advent Wreath. I often ask people, “What’s the most important part of the symbolism of the Advent Wreath?” Some reply the evergreen wreath, which is a reminder of God’s unfading fidelity to his covenant, his merciful love that endures forever. Others say it’s the candles, how, according to medieval color schemes, the purple candles show hope and penitence, and the rose candle shows joy. Those are both solid guesses but neither’s right. The most important part of the Advent wreath is the flame. We show by the flame that, like the wise bridesmaids waiting for the return of the Bridegroom in Jesus’ parable, we are on fire waiting for coming of Jesus. As Advent grows, so does that fire: it doubles, it triples, it quadruples. Eventually we’re supposed to be burning on all cylinders, showing that we’re loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Today’s Day of Recollection is meant to pour gasoline on that fire.
  • The readings today help us to do this in helping us to focus on the Prophet Elijah and St. John the Baptist. Sirach tells us in the first reading, “Like a fire there appeared the prophet Elijah,” his words were a “flaming furnace,” in his “zeal” three times he “brought down fire,” he was even taken aloft in a “whirlwind of fire, in a charity with fiery horses.” Elijah’s whole prophetic work was to bring divine fire to earth and to help people respond with fire. It was the same thing with St. John the Baptist. His mission wasn’t a cold engineering project to level spiritual mountains, fill valleys, straighten crooked roads, and smooth rough ones. It was to help get us ready to embrace Christ, who when he finally began his public ministry announced, “I have come to set the world on fire and how I am in anguish until it is enkindled.” John the Baptist’s work was, in a sense, to get all the wood ready and dry for this world-embracing blaze.
  • Jesus points to the connection between Elijah and John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. Peter, James and John asked Jesus, as they were descending from the mountain of Transfiguration after having witnessed Elijah and Moses conversing with Jesus, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?” The prophet Malachi had foretold, “Behold, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Mal 4:5; Mal 3:1). As daily Mass goers heard on Thursday, when Jesus said that no one born of woman is greater than John the Baptist, “If you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come. Whoever has ears ought to hear.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus is far more explicit in response to the three apostles’ question, declaring, “Elijah will indeed come and restore all things, but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased. So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands” (Mt 17:12). Just as people had manhandled his precursor, just as Elijah himself was persecuted, harassed and hunted down by the prophets and royal patrons of the pagan god Ba’al, so Jesus himself would likewise suffer. Just as John the Baptist as the long-awaited “Elijah” pointed out the long-awaited “Messiah” — in birth, preaching and death — so the “Messiah” was here pointing out the long-awaited “Elijah.”
  • When John came, his words, too, were like a flaming furnace and his work to clear debris with a spiritual firehose. He said to those who were coming to him at the Jordan, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” His words point out two essential aspects of Advent. The first is the fire of conversion, in which we allow God to burn away, to purify, whatever is unworthy of him. The second is to help us live out our baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire. The Holy Spirit came down upon the earliest members of the Church as tongues of fire so that we could then continue Jesus’ work of igniting the whole world. The two applications go together. The Advent fire is meant to bring about both greater conversion and greater zeal.
  • Pope Benedict once gave an unforgettable Pentecost homily when he talked about how God wants to light us on fire with the fire of the Holy Spirit. But he said many of us first must overcome a fear of that holy flame: “The divine fire frightens us, we are afraid of being ‘burned,’ we prefer to stay just as we are. This is because our life is often formed according to the logic of having, of possessing and not the logic of self-giving. Many people believe in God and admire the person of Jesus Christ, but when they are asked to lose something of themselves, then they retreat, they are afraid of the demands of faith. There is the fear of giving up something nice to which we are attached; the fear that following Christ deprives us of freedom, of certain experiences, of a part of ourselves. On one hand, we want to be with Jesus, follow him closely, and, on the other hand, we are afraid of the consequences that this brings with it. … We must know how to recognize that losing something, indeed, losing ourselves for the true God, the God of love and of life, is, in reality, gaining ourselves, finding ourselves more fully. Whoever entrusts himself to Jesus already experiences in this life peace and joy of heart, which the world cannot give, and cannot take away, once God has given it to us. So it is worthwhile to let ourselves be touched by the fire of the Holy Spirit! The suffering that it causes us is necessary for our transformation. It is the reality of the cross: It is not for nothing that in the language of Jesus ‘fire’ is above all a representation of the cross, without which Christianity does not exist.” Pope Benedict said that the flame of God’s love is like the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses (Ex 3:2). “It is a flame that burns but does not destroy, that, in burning, brings forth the better and truer part of man, as in a fusion it makes his interior form emerge, his vocation to truth and to love.  … It causes a transformation, and it must for this reason consume something in man, the waste that corrupts him and hinders his relations with God and neighbor.”
  • Someone who lived with that fire was St. Lucy. Early in life she was touched by the Lord’s love. She offered herself to him in virginal love, but her mother Eutychia nevertheless made plans to marry her off to a rich pagan. After her spurned suitor grasped that her vow of virginity likely meant that she was a Christian and turned her over to Diocletian’s persecutorial administration, she was condemned to death in Syracuse, Sicily. What St. Ambrose said of St. Agnes’ virginity we could likewise say of St. Lucy’s: “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in virgin martyrs, but because it itself makes the virgin martyrs.” The type of love that leads one to consecrate herself totally to God in response to his love, who battles temptations every day to keep that love pure, is what makes a person strong in loving him to the end, loving him despite suffering, torture and even execution. When virginity, or celibate chastity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, is assumed and lived to the full, it leads to loving fidelity in little and big things, it leads to a daily martyrdom, a witness, of the love we’ve first received and can’t help but radiate. Lucy’s name, from the Latin word for light, testifies to the fact that her existence radiated the light coming from the flame of divine love. We’re all supposed to radiate that light. We’re all supposed to give off that warmth and illumine others. God wants to eliminate the impurities in our human love so that we might in fact see and love him in others, and ground all our interactions with others with holy fire of God.
  • The greatest way we get filled with fire is here at Mass. St. Ephrem, the fourth century Syrian doctor of the Church, used to say that when we receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist we receive “fire.” It’s here that we get ignited to go out and light the world ablaze. So today, as we begin this Day of Recollection as we near the midpoint of Advent, let us receive the word of Elijah and John the Baptist and run out to meet Christ who comes to reignite us. With the words of the Psalm, we implore, “Lord, make us turn to you. Let us see your face and we shall be saved.” And we ask St. Lucy, patron saint of those with eye troubles, to help us and others keep our eyes fixed on him, the Lamb of God, always so that, after the long Advent of earthly life, we may come to experience eternal joy in that kingdom where we hope to see him with eyes burning with love (Rev 1:14, 2:18, 19:12), looking at us forever.

    •  

    The readings for today’s Mass were: 

    Reading 1 SIR 48:1-4, 9-11
    In those days,
    like a fire there appeared the prophet Elijah
    whose words were as a flaming furnace.
    Their staff of bread he shattered,
    in his zeal he reduced them to straits;
    By the Lord’s word he shut up the heavens
    and three times brought down fire.
    How awesome are you, Elijah, in your wondrous deeds!
    Whose glory is equal to yours?
    You were taken aloft in a whirlwind of fire,
    in a chariot with fiery horses.
    You were destined, it is written, in time to come
    to put an end to wrath before the day of the LORD,
    To turn back the hearts of fathers toward their sons,
    and to re-establish the tribes of Jacob.
    Blessed is he who shall have seen you
    and who falls asleep in your friendship.
    Responsorial Psalm PS 80:2AC AND 3B, 15-16, 18-19
    R. (4) Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
    O shepherd of Israel, hearken,
    From your throne upon the cherubim, shine forth.
    Rouse your power.
    R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
    Once again, O LORD of hosts,
    look down from heaven, and see;
    Take care of this vine,
    and protect what your right hand has planted
    the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
    R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
    May your help be with the man of your right hand,
    with the son of man whom you yourself made strong.
    Then we will no more withdraw from you;
    give us new life, and we will call upon your name.
    R. Lord, make us turn to you; let us see your face and we shall be saved.
    Alleluia LK 3:4, 6

    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

    Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths:
    All flesh shall see the salvation of God.
    R. Alleluia, alleluia.

    Gospel MT 17:9A, 10-13
    As they were coming down from the mountain,
    the disciples asked Jesus,
    “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”
    He said in reply, “Elijah will indeed come and restore all things;
    but I tell you that Elijah has already come,
    and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased.
    So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands.”
    Then the disciples understood
    that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.

    The post Advent Fire, Second Saturday of Advent, December 13, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

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