When the Roman Rite of Mass was revised after the Second Vatican Council, the Collect for the First Sunday of Advent was changed. Before Vatican II the Collect for the First Sunday of Advemt was (my translation):
Stir up your power, we pray, O Lord, and come,
that with you as protector
we may be freed from the imminent danger of our sins,
and with you as our liberator
we may be saved.
This contrasts with the Collect that we have now:
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
The contrast between the two texts is clear: the 1570 text dwells on sins we have committed, the 1970 one on good deeds we aim to perform. The current prayer has a degree of optimism that its predecessor lacks. Both come from early Sacramentaries.
A Christian looks to the future with a mixture of hope and fear. Our Lord’s parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25, 31-46) illustrates this. In the Middle Ages a tendency grew of emphasising the challenge of Christian teaching at the expense of the comfort that it offers. For instance, representations of the Last Judgement are to be seen in many of our churches and cathedrals of that period, and consideration of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell) held an important place in Catechesis.
The Second Vatican Council, concluding its statement on the Church in the Modern World, looked forward to a time when ‘humans throughout the world will be aroused to a lively hope - which is the gift of the Holy Spirit - to be raised up eventually in peace and the highest blessedness in that homeland which is radiant with the glory of the Lord’.
The revisors of the Liturgy after the Council wanted to reflect this rediscovered emphasis on hope. Consequently, they demoted the old Collect for Advent Sunday to Friday in the First Week of Advent and replaced it with the current one.
