Jesus said to his disciples: “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away. So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left. Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” (Matthew 24.37-44)
On this First Sunday of Advent, there is an odd juxtaposition of events. A long-standing tradition that dates back at least a thousand years, the First Sunday of Advent begins a new liturgical year. And yet, the gospel text selected for today makes clear that the focus should not be on the beginning of a new year, but on the ending of time.
If that were not a head scratcher enough, we also find still another odd coupling. As most everybody knows, Advent is a four-week period that urges us to prepare for Christmas, the annual celebration of the coming of the God-Man into the world at Bethlehem. However, it is obvious that our text would have us prepare for the Second Coming of the Lord, his Parousia.
Somehow, these unusual pairings make sense, all things considered, supported by the multifaceted nature of Advent which lends itself to looking ahead, not only towards the birth of Jesus, a new beginning, but also towards his return, marking the end of the world as we know it. Much like bookends, the dual time periods lean into each other.
From the start, Advent has carried a penitential tone, symbolized by the purple candles on the Advent wreath. That aspect also is not so difficult to understand. Any major event in one’s life calls for preparations, and preparing for something big almost always requires an investment of time, energy, and focus. A smart marathon runner does not show up at the starting line on the big day without having put in many workouts in the weeks prior to the event.
So, the season of Advent serves much the same purpose, urging us to make ourselves fit and ready for the coming of the Lord, particularly at Christmas, but with an eye also down the road to the Parousia when Christ comes a second time, this time to consummate the work begun the first time, reclaiming once and for all the world, establishing without contestation the reign of God.
Of course, the penitential dimension of the season regularly gets eclipsed by the hurried and harried rush to prepare for the secular Christmas, requiring the decorating of the Christmas tree, the shopping for gifts, and the making of travel arrangements. Not that these things aren’t important. They are or they wouldn’t be such bedrocks of the holiday.
But it is important to keep our eye on the ball, or on the baby born in Bethlehem in this instance, which means seeing Christmas first and foremost as a spiritual event, understood as a moment when the holy entered the unholy, when heaven touched earth, when the Divine One whispered his word into our world. Seen in this way, we certainly want to be all eyes and all ears, getting our souls in tip-top shape with the same intensity and intentionality as we decorate our homes for the festivities.
Fortunately, the scripture passages selected for these weeks prior to Christmas will assist us in this effort, pulling our attention away from the glittering lights and the busy stores, instead urging us to think of the spiritual, not only of the material. If we do so, our spirits will benefit greatly, as satisfied as our stomachs after Christmas dinner.
Accepting that call, we should take a moment to look more closely at the text that is put before us today, a text that, as we already have stated, concerns the end of the world. It is a part of a greater section near the close of Matthew’s gospel–Matthew being our guide for the liturgical year ahead–a section that has Rabbi Jesus speak in apocalyptic terms, a Jewish theological notion that envisioned the cataclysmic and catastrophic upheavals that preface the end of the world, that final moment in human history when God lays claim to the world as its creator and destroys every remnant of evil as he re-establishes his reign upon the earth as it was in the beginning.
As so often happens, Matthew borrows freely here from the Gospel of Mark whose text preceded his own writing by several decades. Luke does the same as we have seen just a few weeks ago when Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Each evangelist tailors the text for his particular purposes, but overall there is great continuity among the three, the differences not significant enough to pinpoint in our discussion today.
The important thing for us to notice is the tone that Jesus takes when talking about the end times. It has much the same feel as our horror flicks in which dark and dangerous things happen, putting us on the edge of our seats, our heartbeats increasing as we anticipate the next bad thing that comes out of nowhere. While some may enjoy the thrill and the adrenaline rush, we are not meant to take Jesus’ words with such levity.
“So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man,” he says to his disciples, telling them that “two men will be out in the field. One will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and one will be left.” Even by our standards, this is spooky stuff. But apocalyptic literature never was meant to be bedtime stories.
The point of Jesus’ words, of course, is that we want to be ready when the time comes. “Stay awake,” he says, “for you do not know on which day your Lord will come.” Matthew, unlike his fellow evangelists, has Jesus use the example of Noah, the only person in the story of the Great Flood who was ready when the first raindrop fell from the heavens.
Jesus says, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day that Noah entered the ark. They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.” It is clear that Jesus wants his disciples to be as prepared as Noah, unlike Noah’s neighbors who went about business as usual, never giving a thought to the catastrophe that was coming for them around the corner.
One reason that Matthew emphasizes this point of preparedness is because his audience has grown tired of waiting, the promise of the Resurrected Lord’s return failing to materialize as soon as it had been expected, the people losing heart as a result in the face of their fellow Jews’ mockery and scorn. They were embarrassed by the failure of the Lord to return.
Years earlier, Paul in his writings to the Thessalonians had to address the same issue, it becoming clear already by that point that the Second Coming wasn’t sticking to the schedule that the early believers had planned. Believing the end was imminent, some believers had quit working, quit marrying, and basically quit everything, so Paul had to tell them that lounging on pool chairs was not the way to pass the time.
Of course, the wariness of the wait has only intensified as two millenia have passed and the Lord still has not returned to reclaim the world. As a result, for many it has become a non-issue, except for the fanatical few who build bunkers and who harangue on street corners, convincing themselves that their calculus is advanced placement level.
I tend to think either extreme is dangerous because both are wasting precious time. Those who have packed away the notion of the Second Coming in the attic like their high school football jerseys, holding on to it for old-times sake, should be reminded that while the end of the world is clouded with uncertainties, the end of our lives is not. Preparing for that hard, cold truth is always time well spent. Also, it is good to remember that, like the airlines, our carry-on luggage is limited when we leave this world.
Likewise, those who are sure the end is right around the corner, searching out clues to the exact day like somebody on a scavenger hunt, could spend their time attending to more important things, such as answering in the here and now the cries of the poor whose world is on the brink of destruction every single day.
So, rather than find ourselves on one or the other side of the bleachers in this debate, I propose a third way. We should entertain the possibility that the Risen Lord comes to us each and every day. His coming, of course, will not be as spectacular or as shocking as the apocalyptic landscape would paint it, but it is nonetheless real, meaning we must live in the world with our eyes always open to Christ’s coming to us in the ordinary, in the mundane, and even in the ugly.
I don’t think it is coincidental that Matthew ends this apocalyptic section with the parable of the Judgment of the Nations at the end times, a parable in which Jesus envisions the Almighty dividing people as one might do sheep and goats. And upon what bases does the Almighty deem some worthy and others unworthy?
Here it is. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” Jesus continued, “Then the righteous will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you as a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? When did we see you ill or in prison and visit you? And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”
It is easy enough to see therein our prescription for how to live in these in between times. We are to experience each moment as an opportunity to find the Risen Lord among us, coming to us in the poor, in the beleaguered, in the persecuted, in the abandoned. These least ones may not carry the shock and awe of the Second Coming, but they carry the presence of Christ on them without question, unless we want to play chicken with Jesus’ words.
So, this season of Advent urges us to be watchful and vigilant for the Lord’s coming. But I suggest we widen our lens a bit, recognizing that it is not enough to celebrate the Lord’s coming at Christmas or to anticipate his Second Coming at the end of the world. Rather, we must be watchful and ready for his coming each and every day. With that understanding, we will be prepared whatever the day and whatever the hour, always ready to greet him.
In this way, when Christmas comes and whenever the Second Coming arrives, we will have nothing to be anxious about. We will be meeting no stranger, but only an oddly familiar face, one whom we met innumerable times along the way, found in the forlorn widow, in the forgotten orphan, in the forsaken foreigner, each of whom we helped and held close, and his words will reach deep into our souls, “Hello, old friend.”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 