A call for the Messiah #5 – O Dayspring!

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Praised be Jesus Christ! December 21, another Advent antiphon ahead of us. At the beginning, traditionally, let us listen to Fr Thomas Jarosz singing.

Today’s antiphon is a continuation of yesterday’s. The call is repeated here for the Messiah who is to come to those who are in the darkness and shadow of death. This time, however, the request is not for the opening of the prison, but for enlightenment. Note that this antiphon has a lot of light in addition to the dark and shadow themes. Three times the Messiah is called as the source of light – sunrise, glow, sun. Just as yesterday Jesus was shown to us as the one who can open the prison of our sins, free us from it, so today he brings us light so that we can confidently and without doubt see and judge what is good and what is bad in our lives; that we may follow a sure path to the goal we have chosen, and that we may not miss it. Let us use an example in our discussion: if we enter a room that has no source of external light, there are no windows – for example a closet, a basement – and we close the door behind us, it will be dark in that place. Now think that you are given a task to retrieve some item from this room that is there, some specific thing. How will you do it? You don’t know where precisely this thing is, but you know it is there. Before you find it, you must defeat your greatest enemy – darkness. There is only one option – you need to turn on the light. Darkness cannot be removed by throwing it in a bucket through the door. Only when we light up the room, we find the way to the goal, we avoid the obstacles lurking in the dark. And at this point someone might say, “Well, no, there’s another way. There is one more way to find the thing we’re looking for. We still have the sense of touch, we can move by touching the wall, and for greater certainty we can crouch. This way we will avoid the obstacles in this basement, in this room. And so gradually – by touching the wall, various elements that are there – we will find what we are looking for ”. And you can combine it this way, but it’s probably not the fastest way to the goal. Besides, the question remains: “How can we be sure that what we are holding in our hands is the object we have been looking for and not just something similar to it?”. It is the same with our life. If we live in darkness and in the shadow of death, that is, in sin, in order to remove it from our lives, we need the light that is Jesus and His Word. We all look for happiness in life, but if we walk in the dark, in the darkness, it may turn out that what we have grabbed and may seemingly seem to be what we have been looking for is just another stone that is pulling us down, is an appearance of happiness – We missed once again, because we lacked confidence that true life is only in God and in His ways, in His light. Let us also pay attention to the fact that the light in today’s antiphon is not static – it is dynamic, full of movement. In the beginning there is sunrise that breaks the darkness of the night; then the glow that illuminates the day, and finally the full sun, thanks to which we can see everything clearly in the palm of your hand. This light does not blind you, but gradually gets your eyes used to it. In the same way, Jesus illuminates our life, gradually accustoms the eyes of our faith to see God’s ways more and more confidently, to distinguish between what is good and what is bad, avoid the obstacles of sin, so that we ourselves become “the light of the world”. Let us ask Jesus to be our light, to see the sins we are to remove from our lives, to see and avoid obstacles, temptations, and opportunities for sin; that we may reach the goal of salvation – full happiness.

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