My Dad dearly loved this nation of ours. A first-generation American, he had served in Europe during the Second World War and had returned home full of pride and enthusiasm for America’s ascendancy. As a little kid, I remember sitting at breakfast with him on Sunday mornings, me in my pj’s munching my Cheerios, while he crunched on his toast. Sometimes he’d look up from his newspaper, smile at me, and say proudly, “America is the greatest country in the world.” Automobiles, electrical appliances, all modern conveniences, and especially television (We were the first on our block to have the teeniest of new TV’s.) were the perfect proof. My dad was a proud American. Small wonder that years later when an American was about to step foot onto the moon, he was glued to the set. My mum and I joined him to keep vigil by the TV that momentous Sunday evening in July of 1969. I was 16. And as the evening worn on, we waited and watched and waited some more until late into the night. Finally, at one point before the landing, when I literally could not keep my eyes open, I quietly announced that I was going to bed. I’d see it all on the news in the morning. Then my Dad went nuts. He hardly ever yelled at me, but this was too much for him. Un-American behavior, betrayal, insubordination, disloyalty. Call it what you will. Permission denied. I was ordered to continue my vigil by the set. Then finally it happened, and we heard the words, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” “Unbelievable,” my Dad murmured. “America is the greatest country in the world.” And I might have missed it all.
Jesus’ admonition echoes
like my Dad’s this morning. “Keep alert. Something big is about to happen. Be
watchful. Watch. Watch.” Three times he says it. “You don’t want to miss out.
Your best hope is near.” Jesus the Lord wants our attention. He doesn’t want to
arrive at a darkened house with no one awake. He wants a warm welcome. And as
He lists the nighttime hours when his arrival may occur, perhaps as monks, we
are reminded of our own efforts at earlier rising to watch for his arrival. For
it is our duty and our privilege to become attuned to his continual advent.
For if it is true, as we believe, that one day the Lord will return once and
for all to gather us all together and bring us home to the Father in the end
time, we also know that His coming toward us is a relentless, already-happening
reality. And we are meant to be experts - experts at waiting,
attentiveness, experts at emptiness, the emptiness that is constantly clearing
a space for him. For in Christ Jesus God has made one giant leap towards us.
Jesus our Lord is always drawing near.
You know in the repeated
“Watch!” of Jesus’ admonition this morning, we are meant to hear echoes of the
passion narrative - Jesus’ threefold, heartfelt call to his disciples in the
dark night of Gethsemani. “Please keep watch with me,” Jesus begging his
disciples to be alert for the crisis of his passion which is about to unfold.* And he
asks the same of us - to be ready to assent with him to the Father’s desire for
our total self-offering moment by moment. For us to watch through
the night for Him, with Him is to watch in darkness, obscurity, lack of
clarity; in the unknowing faith that always awaits his redeeming
presence. This attentiveness is the secret we were made for.
But if we long urgently for
his drawing near to us, Isaiah paints well our sad predicament this morning. “O
that you would rend the heavens and come down. But wait a minute, wait, we are
sinful, in fact, even our good deeds are like polluted rags.” Whew! What to do?
Paul’s response ages later is healing and sobering consolation. He tells us,
“It’s not about you. You are already lacking in no spiritual gift as you wait,
for Jesus himself through the shedding of his most precious blood has made you
irreproachable.” Irreproachable! We cannot fail. For God’s desire to come near
in Christ has itself broken down all barriers.
If as Jesus tells us, “You
do not know when the time will come.” It is because the time He’s
talking about is God’s time, the already and not yet of God’s advent. And God’s
time is always - the moment by moment opportunity for us to choose
God and to fall backwards into his desire for us. (The Greek word used for time
here is kairos. The Greek language has another word for time, chronos,
that’s clock time. But kairos is very different.) And so if
today we hear a call to await the person of Christ, it is a call to attend
to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as well as a lifetime of small
opportunities to attend to Him, times when Christ Jesus comes to ask something
of us, as the Father did of him. We must be ready and alert.
Finally, perhaps one good
reason that Jesus so urgently exhorts us to be attentive is that the mode of
his approach is most often so unassuming, ordinary, unremarkable, and almost
forgettable. Like a sleepy teenager in front of late-night TV, we need to watch
or we’ll miss out. The hour is now, God’s time is now. But be aware His giant
leap toward us is usually in silence and obscurity. Hidden first of all in the
warm womb of a pregnant virgin mother, He then lives a hidden small-town life
as a carpenter and wandering preacher. Then in the excruciating hour of his
death on the cross, all his beauty and power will be hidden, smeared, and
obscured by the blood and spittle and scorn of his passion. And finally even in
his joyous resurrected return to his disciples; he will sneak in through locked
doors to whisper, “Peace” and to ask quietly for something to eat.
And so He comes again this
morning, the “Lord of the house.” Once again, here and now in this Sacred
Liturgy, he invites us into his kairos, God’s time, the fullness of
time, the appointed time, the hour pregnant like Mary with Possibility, when he
comes to make a radiant sacrament of our ordinariness. We need to keep watch.
*See Believers Church Bible Commentary,
Reflection by one of the monks for this First Sunday of Advent.