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First Sunday of Advent

Advent is the season which begins the Church’s year. Appropriately, then, Advent prepares us for the coming of the Lord and is for that reason a season of hope and expectation. Before Advent concentrates fully on preparation for the feast of the nativity of the Saviour, this season first invites us to look with hope to the future and to the coming of the Son of Man. So even if we are already thinking about and preparing for Christmas, Advent first asks us to look beyond the 25^th December 2007 to the coming of the Lord in glory.

And the message of the Gospel today is that we must stand ready because the Son of Man is coming at an hour we do not expect. We don’t want to be caught off guard as people of old were when the flood came and swept everything away. We don’t want to be occupied and preoccupied with the business and busy-ness of living, with eating and drinking, marrying and begetting, buying and selling, building and re-building, without a thought about what it all means, where is it all going, what is the point of all the effort.

Nowadays people may be tempted to think that there is no point to our lives outside ourselves, the success of our plans and the accomplishment of our projects. They may feel too that, more than anything, the purpose of our lives is dictated ultimately by blind cosmic forces, or by the powers of nature or by the wonders of technology. But can this be all there is? Are we ultimately the slaves of the universe or of the laws of evolution and science? The message of Advent is a totally other. The Good News of Advent assures us that the heavens are not empty. The Lord of the universe is the God who has shown himself in Jesus and our whole existence is directed towards an encounter with the living God who is Love, and this is our salvation. Our lives and the universe are ultimately governed by God who is Love, and whose face we have seen in Jesus, the Son of Man whose coming we await.

For this reason we are encouraged to live not according to selfish desires or needs but we are to live according to a different logic, the logic of salvation. That is what St. Paul is getting at in today’s second reading, when he talks about our needing to wake up because our day of salvation is expected even if we cannot say when. He urges us to live decently, “no drunken orgies, no promiscuity or licentiousness, and no wrangling or jealously”. He tells us, “Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ”. We have a trustworthy measure of judgement for our behaviour: our behaviour should correspond to that encounter with the living God to which our lives are directed. This is the sense of the 1^st Sunday of Advent: that our lives are directed to an encounter with the God who is Love and we will be led to that encounter by Jesus, the Son of Man, who is awaited in hope.

I have called Advent the season of hope. This hope is not simply something, but is Someone: this hope is not based on passing things or on things that we can lose or can be taken away from us. This hope is based on God who never ceases to give himself to us, on the Lord who constantly comes to us. This is the hope with which we look for the coming of the Lord. This is the hope with which we stand ready for the coming in glory of the Son of Man.

St. Margaret's Johnstone 2nd December 2007