“I have been with you wherever you went”: thus God reminds David through Nathan. God is with us at all times and in all places. It is the same promise with which Gabriel greets Mary: “the Lord is with you”. The refrain of the responsorial psalm therefore invites us to perennial praise because at all times – forever! – the Lord’s love for us is manifested, albeit in different ways. Paul reminds the Romans: the mystery, first shrouded in silence, then announced by the Prophets, has now been revealed in the Gospel of Jesus in a full and definitive way. And it continues to reveal itself in the testimony of Christians. Advent is therefore a memory of how God has already manifested himself in the past; contemplation of its manifestation today; waiting for its future manifestation. Memory in the faith that remembers, contemplation in the love that tastes, waiting in the hope that he desires. The faith of the Virgin sustains us on this journey. In fact, our response must correspond to the gift of God, which like Mary’s is called to express itself in a welcoming desire: may what you said happen to me. It does not mean simply obeying, but believing in the promise that God makes to each of us. The promise to David – “I will make a house for you” – now becomes: “I will make you my house”. Even our life is called to become “God’s abode”, in the truth of a filial relationship: “I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me”.

Commentary by Comunità di Dumenza

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey