Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Advent 1 A - November 27, 2022
All of the life of discipleship is informed by and moves toward that hope. Evil and suffering are real, but will not ultimately triumph. Death and the grave are the next to the last things that happen to us. The declaration of the nature of Christ’s coming again in glory is not a far away wispy dream, not a threat of violent revenge on the disobedient, but the bedrock of why and how to bother with following Christ at all. How we live in the present, what we believe about our service and prayer and love for one another is inextricably linked, whether we are conscious of it or not, to what we believe is coming for us and for our world. We know God is God because God is a God of promise and God keeps promises. Our hope for the future is grounded in our memory of God’s saving acts. I am not a Christian in order merely for the afterlife payoff, but I cannot remain a Christian without the promise that the world toward which I work and pray and groan is surely to come.
That is the liturgical prelude. Now a prelude on this gospel reading: the Jesus of Nazareth whom we read about in the gospels is jarringly present and open. He keeps showing us and telling us who he is. He is also a mystery because we cannot fully comprehend his identity. He acts in surprising, even shocking ways. He does not bend to our ideas of Messiah, or even much care about our ideas. He is simple, but never easy. Spend a lifetime pondering and living his words, and you will barely scratch the surface of their meaning. From beginning to end, he does the Father’s will by modeling and proclaiming God’s love for all. He announces that this kingdom and way of love is alive in God’s covenant faithfulness in a way of being human and in a community that loves neighbor as self. The triumphant justification of us and the world in a new heaven and a new earth is coming, so our vocation is to live now in anticipation of what is to come.
Now to the reading itself. Our finitude and that of the earth forces the questions of meaning. The spiritual value of apocalyptic speech is the seriousness of choice, the necessity of awakening to reality - to look, to see. We wake up especially to those realities we would rather avoid, that make us uncomfortable, that confront us with our duplicity, our double-mindedness. Christ believes in our power more than we do. He sees our freedom at times when we would rather escape it. He is not going to force us onto the ark of salvation, but it is there and we have to make a choice. Jesus continues to be the great Illuminator still. To the receptive and willing, the good news is their greatest joy and hope. To the resistant this same good news stirs confusion, misinterpretation, opposition, and hate. This language does not condescend to our categories of analysis.
Part of why beginning Advent with the apocalypse is so powerful is that we enter right away a realm where time gets bent, answers become questions and questions become answers, and our safe and small categories of truth and security are shattered in the light of God’s wild and wide passion for the whole universe. In Advent we do away with the introductory pleasantries and plunge right into the nature of the paradox of the words themselves: we are waiting for Christ. Christ is already here. We long to see the promise of our hope. We already see it. The hope of Advent is born in the meeting of our desire and God’s desire; we send our waiting from the present into the future. God sends the kingdom of peace from the future to the present. We believe they meet and that meeting is called hope.
The waiting is the surrender. This kind of waiting is not like waiting for the train. Advent waiting is the active, open-ended expectation of the real but unknown and unknowable. For Christ, the human vocation is to enter into this disequilibrium, not avoid it or explain it. We are most fully human when we know ourselves as creatures and entrust our mortal creatureliness to the one who made us and will remake us anew. The good news is that the waiting is already the very offering that forms in us the eyes to see and the ears to hear Christ’s coming among us.
When we lapse into passivity and indifference, may Christ the Prophet break in and steal our apathy and stir in us the cry, “Come, Lord Jesus.” When we are overly impressed with our own power and believe we know best how to fix the world, may Christ the Savior break in and steal our pride and groan within us, “How long, O Lord?”
I conclude with this beautiful quote from Megan McKenna: “Advent is about judgment and standing in the presence of the thief, the Son of Man, not flinching, looking God straight in the eye, and rejoicing… The Holy One is coming to visit and is intent on stealing us away from all we are attached to and binding us to one another in peace.” Amen.
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