O Rising Sun – 21st December

O Rising Sun, you are the splendour of eternal light and the sun of justice, O come and enlighten those who sit in the darkness and in the shadow of death.

Through the loving mercy of our God the Rising Sun has come to visit us.  Daily the sun rises.  All peoples everywhere, take that for granted.  Very few lie down at night wondering if the dawn will come.  In a world of few certainties and much doubt people are still confident, sure that tomorrow the sun will rise again, there will be a new day.

The Word of God tells us that Christ’s coming is as certain as that dawn.  Are we in fact as certain that He is coming, as we are that in the morning the sun will rise?  Is that the kind of confident hope we give to our world – a word to cheer the hearts of all peoples and disperse the gloomy shades of night?

How do we become people who are absolutely sure of Jesus and who speak about Him with authority and power – a power, a conviction that changes lives.

Today’s ‘O Antiphon’ five lines long, gives us I think a very profound insight and practical help as we grapple with this question.  In these short five lines, six Scripture passages are quoted.  This prayer is the fruit of someone living deeply with the Word of God and eventually perhaps even unconsciously, returning prayer to God in God’s own Words.  So deeply is his consciousness formed and transformed by God’s Word.

There are so many voices in our world today all clamouring for attention.  People are being formed by the T.V., the internet, the media, advertisements, popular opinion, their own selfish whims – a whole secular culture that has ceased listening to God’s Word and is lost in a labyrinth of confusion, racing this way and that, seeking happiness and meaning where it cannot be found.  So many minds are darkened, lacking vision their judgement is clouded.  They cannot see the light because they are looking in the wrong direction.

Our Antiphon today calls us to be people who look toward the East – that is in the right direction of the coming of Christ, the dayspring, the rising sun who dawns upon us from on high, to give light to those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.  He is the splendour of Eternal Light, the brightness of God’s glory and the figure of His substance.  He reveals the face of God.  He tells from whence we have come and to where we are going.  He brings clarity.  In His light we see light.  Our faltering steps that have been fumbling about in the darkness, stumbling , are given a spring.  We can march forward in confidence because His Word lights up our way.  We know where we are going and how to get there.  He is the way.

The music of today’s antiphon conveys this so beautifully.  Today’s ‘O Antiphon’ departs from the familiar pattern of the last four days.  Up until now the ‘Veni’ has come from the depths sung on ‘doh, fa, me’, but today our ‘Veni’ has a certitude, a note of triumph, the beginning of jubilation.   It is as if the first rays of the dayspring are already illuminating our eyes.   Today our cry ‘Veni’ is sung on ‘la so’, right after the musical summit of the whole antiphon – this is not a tentative cry of wishful thinking but the cry from some one who has already seen the light, of one who knows His coming is certain as the dawn.

Mary, our Mother, intercede for us.

Loose the bonds that bind us, lost in sins own blindness.

God’s own light, Jesus our Saviour, may guide us.