Shortly we will enter the liturgical season of Advent – the time of anticipation of Christ’s coming into the world and the fulfillment of God’s plan for humanity and all creation. Today’s first reading, reportedly written by John during his exile on the island of Patmos, illustrates the cosmic dimensions of our faith and the scope and power of our hope. The serpent or the dragon looms as a terrible symbol of the chaos of the abyss that resonates with our most ancient imagination and our most hidden selves.

Then I saw an angel come down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the abyss and a heavy chain. He seized the dragon, the ancient serpent, which is the Devil or Satan, and tied it up for a thousand years and threw it into the abyss, which he locked over it and sealed, so that it could no longer lead the nations astray until the thousand years are completed (Rev 20:1-3).

We live in the epoch between the first coming of Christ and the ultimate fulfillment of salvation when the faithful will see God as He really is and ourselves with Him. John’s image of Jesus binding the devil for a millennium is a reminder of the invitation to love and the freedom granted by God’s gift of himself in the incarnation. Advent is not a season to sleep through but a time of great wonder as we await the coming of the Anointed One, the One that our ancestors the prophets promised would come into the world in order to reconcile all things.

Chaos and the unfathomable abyss of evil no longer triumph; hatred and sin cannot have the last word for the darkness is lit by a light that can never be extinguished.