This is yet another direction of the road on which Advent sets us on. Man not only walks towards God through what is in him: through his incompleteness, his threat, and at the same time the transcendental character of his personality, directed towards truth, the good, the beautiful; through culture and science; through the desire and nostalgia for a more human world, more worthy of man.
Man not only walks towards God (moreover, often without knowing it or even denying it) through his own advent: through the cry of his humanity. Man walks towards God, walking, in the history of salvation, before God: before the Lord, as we hear in the Gospel with regard to John the Baptist, who had to walk before the Lord in spirit and strength.
This new direction of man's path of advent is connected in a special way with the Advent of Christ. However, man walks "before the Lord" from the beginning and will walk before Him to the end, because he is simply the image of God. Therefore, walking through the streets of the world, he tells the world and bears witness to himself of Whom he is the image.
He walks before the Lord, subduing the earth, for in fact the earth itself, as well as all creation, are subject to the Lord and the Lord has given them into the dominion of man.
He walks before the Lord, filling his humanity and earthly history with the content of his work, with the content of culture and science, with the content of the unceasing quest for truth, goodness, beauty, justice, love, peace. And he walks before the Lord, often enveloping himself in everything that is a negation of truth, goodness and beauty, a negation of justice, love, peace. Sometimes he feels that he is very much enveloped in these negations. Almost by contrast he then feels the full weight of the disfigured image of God in his soul and in his history.
The advent of man meets the advent of Christ.
"O Radix Iesse, qui stas in signum populorum,.... quem gentes deprecabuntur, veni ad liberandum nos, iam noli tardare!"
The Advent of Christ is indispensable, so that man may find in it the certainty that, walking through the world, living from day to day and from year to year, loving and suffering..., he walks before the Lord, whose image he is in the world; that he bears witness to Him before the whole of creation.
[Pope John Paul II, homily to university students 19 December 1980, no. 4]