December 2, 2025
First Tuesday of Advent
Fr. Alessandro Coniglio
May the Lord give you Peace! I am Fr. Alessandro Coniglio, professor at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem.
We have just begun to take our first steps along this Advent journey, and immediately the word of Jesus opens to the praise of the heavenly Father, because He has revealed His mystery of salvation not to the wise and learned, not to those who can boast academic titles, but to the little ones, the simple, those who are able to tune in—fully willing to listen and welcome—the revelation that Jesus of Nazareth has come to bring us.
The Advent journey is a trembling and joyful expectation of a God who, in order to enter into communion with us, chose to make Himself small in every way: He became a child and wanted to share our same slow and laborious stages of growth; He emptied Himself of His divinity, hiding it under the humble appearance of a fragile humanity, like that of each one of us; He hid Himself from the eyes of official history, the one written by “those who matter,” choosing instead to live a completely “unremarkable” life, like that of any Israelite of His time, for at least thirty years…
It is therefore no surprise that He praises smallness, revealing to us that, in His benevolence, in His good pleasure, His heavenly Father has chosen precisely the small, the simple, the humble, those who do not matter in the eyes of the world, those who have no titles or social roles to show off, as the ones to whom He would reveal His mystery.
For, Jesus tells us, the knowledge of the mystery of God’s inner life is not a matter of study or human effort, but is pure gift of grace, pure revelation: and only the Son, who is one with the Father, only He who is the eternal Word spoken by the Father from all eternity, only the Word of God can adequately reveal to us the mystery of this intimate life. A life that is an exchange of eternal love between a Father who gives life, who communicates His very life and being, and a Son who receives this life fully and totally.
The very names Father and Son express only a relationship, indicating the bond that unites the two persons: they reveal that God’s life in Himself is a life of pure relationship, an existence of love totally given and fully received, a circulation of love offered and welcomed.
And the Son, Jesus, came into the world—He is born for us in the poverty of Bethlehem—precisely to manifest, reveal, express, and share with us, His brothers and sisters in humanity, this divine life which constitutes the beatifying contemplation of the divine Persons in the Trinity.
The Father’s joy lies in generating the Son, in giving everything and giving Himself entirely to the Son. In the same way, the Son’s blessedness lies in receiving everything with gratitude from the Father—the very life of the Father—who generates the Son in unity of substance with Himself.
The mystery of Trinitarian life seems complicated to the learned, to theologians, but becomes clear to the simple, who sense that they have been chosen, by pure grace and benevolence, to enter into this mystery.
Blessed indeed are the eyes able to see, in every circumstance of life and in everything that happens around us, the signs of this eternal love, which unfolds in the history of the world and wants to involve us not as mere spectators but as participants. By being born for us in Bethlehem, Jesus has made us partakers of the joy of the love that eternally unites the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father. He assumed our smallness and human fragility so that—made children in the Son, adopted children in the only-begotten Son—we might share in the story of eternal love, that divine life reserved for those who welcome it with humility and gratitude.
Peace and good from the Holy Land!
