First Sunday of Advent (A)
November 29th – 30th 2025, 6pm Ballarat East, 9am Bungaree, 10.30am Ballan
This advent I’ve set myself a challenge and that is to offer you a visual image on each of the four Sundays of advent that speaks to, amplifies or relates to the scriptures proclaimed in the liturgy of the Word for that Sunday! The visual image might be a sculpture, a painting, graffiti, a symbol… that stimulates our imagination and fosters deeper reflection on this advent season.
T.S. Eliot wrote:
But to apprehend.                                             The point of intersection of the timeless                        With time, is an occupation of the saint…                      For most of us, there is only the unattended		    Moment.
As our liturgical cycle begins yet again with advent, it’s aim is that we become more attentive to , hopeful about, and prepared for the moment of the great advent of God – when human and cosmic history will have run its course and the timeless, eternal kingdom is fully established – God will come to us, but we too must make our pilgrimage to God.
For this first week of advent, I offer swords into plowshares. 

The first of the advent biblical figures that’s offered to us is the prophet Isaiah that we’ve proclaimed as our first reading – dreaming of a time when all nations and all peoples from all cultures will stream to God’s dwelling place, symbolised by the city of Jerusalem, the highest point of which is Mt Zion, the site of the temple and what is to be attained there isn’t strategic advantage, but the peace that comes from dwelling with God and obedience to his word and so our psalm today, psalm 122, a pilgrim song expresses longing for our homecoming to God in peace and justice and love.
Swords into plowshares is the bronze sculpture that’s outside the United Nations building in New York by the Russian sculptor Evengiy Vuchetich and was presented to the U.N. in 1960 by the former Soviet Union. At the base of the statue is inscribed the words of Isaiah that we hear today – they shall beat their swords into plowshares.
Our world may seem to be so far from realising this hope yet the dream of Isaiah is that these weapons of destruction be melted down to become instruments of peace that will enhance, not destroy life, and will cultivate, not violate our earth. Isaiah’s vision isn’t one of passive nostalgia, but for us it becomes a call for our active efforts to be peacemakers in our world where poverty, social inequalities, suffering, corruption and violence continue. Our world still waits for radical transformation: for fields that grow crops, not landmines; for the transfiguring light of Christ.
Another visual image came to mind as I was preparing this, remembering a piece of art that was hung in the office of a Primary school Principal with whom I worked – the words are what I remember for it said How I dream of the day when the defence force needs to hold a street stall or a raffle to raise its funds and children are educated for peace.
Over 60 years ago, in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the Church said
“The expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one. For here grows the body of a new human family, a body which even now is able to give some shadowing of the new age.”
Advent challenges to live in uncertainty and to act with confidence - with hope, joyful and expectant, with patience and persistence, watching and wakeful, attentive to the advent of God.
So we pray - Come, Lord Jesus.
 	
Fr Justin Driscoll