Jesus really is the answer to life’s most challenging questions. Jesus answers who we are, why we are, the meaning and purpose of our existence, the fulfilment of our deepest longings and desires. He is the remedy for our woundedness and spiritual sickness. Only Jesus Christ can break the enslaving chains of sin. He alone can speak peace to the human heart, strengthen the weak, and give life to those who are spiritually dead.

This Sunday we are told that the most appropriate Advent response, the most significant way to prepare for the coming of Jesus, is through repentance.

Advent calls us to prepare ourselves spiritually for the coming of Jesus. We called to make a fresh beginning with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

Get your heart and your soul into gear. Get back to basics. Focus on what is essential. Live the way God intends and wants you to live.

Now at the conclusion of the year, we are called to proclaim with our lives that Christ is King.

He waits for us to come home to him. He receives us, his prodigal children, now contrite and humble, with an embrace. In that embrace we start to tell him our story, and he begins that process of healing and preparation needed for us to experience Heaven.

The Lateran Basilica, our physical parish church here, and all places of worship are immensely important because they are sacramental spaces. They are dedicated, set-apart spaces where the Body of Christ gathers. We physically assemble to express the truth that the Church is the assembly of the baptized, the people called out by God.

We become holy by being faithful to God in the very ordinary circumstances of life - our family, our work, our community.

Prayer is becoming aware of who God is, and who I am in the presence of God.

Jesus teaches us the importance of praying always and not losing heart. God loves us and he hears us. God will answer our prayers and make the best of even terrible situations. If we put our trust in God, if we pray to him then he will write straight even with the crooked lines of our lives.

Gratitude and praise give us a new outlook on life; they are expressions of faith that bring out the best in us. Living with gratitude is a key to happiness, and it deepens our relationship with God.

Faith is not truly convincing until it is tested. Authentic faith grows and strengthens through adversity. The just person will live by faith while holding onto God's promises, even if the events and experiences of the present seem contradictory or hard to understand.

The prophet reminds us that the false security of wealth can easily blind us to God’s demands and the suffering of our neighbour. The judgment that falls on the rich man in the Gospel is the same warning Amos delivered: God sees and cares about those whom the wealthy ignore.

Our aim to is live free from money's control of our lives, to not be enslaved my material wealth, and rather to be fully owned by God, and nothing else.

Pier Giorgio and Carlo show us that holiness is not a thing of the past but a living reality. They gave a reason for their hope through their joy, their service to the poor, and their love for the Eucharist. And so, we too, are called to be people of good hope. Hope is a daily practice, not a mood. Hope isn’t optimism on autopilot. Hope needs to be worked at. Our Lady is our greatest model for this kind of hope. Her life is a profound testament to the power of hope.

To be a disciple is to fully embrace the identity and mission of Jesus. The cost of discipleship. Jesus must be our first priority and our all.

"What a person is before God, that they are, nothing more, nothing less." True humility recognizes that what we have and who we are, is by grace. We are not self-made people. A humble person knows this and is quick to give thanks and praise to God.

Every time we make a choice we are turning the central part of ourselves into something a little different from what it was before. All our lives we are slowly turning this central thing into a heaven creature or into a hellish creature.

In Mary’s great song of praise, which we hear in the Gospel today, she prophesies that all generations will call her blessed. We fulfill that prophecy every time we repeat Elizabeth’s words in the Hail Mary prayer, that Mary is the most blessed of all women.

Faith is something precious and important. We can ask for faith in prayer, and we can ask for an increase in faith.

St Paul teaches that our new identity calls for a radically new way of living and acting. He is quite clear that this new identity is incompatible with certain kinds of wrong behaviour. He even uses the strong language of saying that we must put to death everything in us that belongs only to earthly life. We must get rid of all those actions and ways of living that do not match up to the standards required by our nature as Christians