December 3, 2025
First Wednesday of Advent
Fr. Ulises Zarza, Custodial Vicar
May the Lord give you peace.
I am Fr. Ulises Zarza, Custodial Vicar
Beloved, in the heart of the first week of Advent the liturgy offers us the Gospel of Matthew 15:29-37, a passage that takes us inside the expectation, compassion and tenderness of a God who never abandons his people. Jesus goes up the mountain and sits down. It is the gesture of the Master, but also of the Bridegroom who looks down from above not to detach himself but to better embrace the lives of men.
St. Ambrose reminds us that Christ goes up the mountain not to remove himself from men, but to draw them to himself. This is how our Advent begins: with a God who does not flee, but who comes to meet us, who allows himself to be glimpsed from the heights of his love to draw our gaze.
The crowd brings to his feet all that is frail: lame, blind, crippled, sick. They bring what does not work, what is not whole, what is heavy. And Jesus heals them. St. Jerome notes that no misery is excluded from Christ's mercy. This is a powerful image for our Advent journey: we can bring to the Lord every toil, every inner struggle, every broken fragment of our lives. Advent is not a time to feign perfection, but to present our wounds to the One who can guard and heal them.
Then, suddenly, in the midst of the healed and amazed crowd, another hunger emerges: that of the body. "I have compassion on this crowd," Jesus says. And he does not say this as a mere emotional motion. It is the feeling of one who feels in his own skin the hunger of the other.
St. Leo the Great explained that Christ came not only to heal, but to participate fully in our condition. This is the heart of Advent: a God who does not remain distant, a God who touches our wounds and shares our shortcomings, who takes our hunger and makes it his own.
The disciples, however, see only scarcity: "How can we feed these people in the desert?" This is the gaze of those who measure reality by their own strength. Jesus, on the other hand, asks them to put what little there is into his hands.
St. Augustine says that the miracle comes from the hands of Christ, but it passes through the hands of the disciples. And so Advent becomes the Lord's question to us: what can you deliver to me of your little? What is that piece of bread, perhaps small, that you do not trust to put in my hands? It is enough: a small gesture, a little good, a word that mends, a silent presence that sustains. It is with the little that God builds the much.
And so the Gospel closes with an image that already smells of Christmas: "They all ate and were filled." God is never stingy; he is never measured. Origen said that in Christ there is bread for every man, because his love has no measure.
In this first week of Advent let us then allow ourselves to be caught up in this superabundance. Let us allow ourselves to be fed by the coming Lord, for man's deepest hunger is not for bread, but to be loved, healed, accompanied.
The Child who will be born is a sign that God takes our expectations seriously and does not leave us alone in our deserts. Peace and good from the Holy Land.
