The Homily

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT (Year A)

We have a new season, a beginning, in the Church’s worship today, but the Gospel is about the end, the Last Judgement. One reason for that choice of Gospel is that it is a good idea at the beginning of any project to look forward to the end – just as it is a good idea for someone beginning a course of study to bear in mind that there are examinations at the end. But there is this difference between the judgement the Gospel talks about and an end of term examination: the student knows how much information he or she has ready for the test and the examiner want to find that out. In the case of the Last Judgement, God already knows where you or I stand and it is on our side that there is need to find out – while there is still opportunity, on our side, to make any necessary changes.

Advent is a time that helps us to find out about ourselves, to find out what it is that is important to us, what it is that occupies the thoughts of our hearts from hour to hour and from day to day; to find out whether we are people who always want to be somewhere else rather than being fully present where we are; to find out what it is we really want; whether beneath and beyond the short-term objective, such as passing an exam or getting on in the world, or simply making ends meet, we cherish a deeper desire that can only be satisfied by God and nothing less. Today is a day to remember that while the world around us bombards our senses with so many claims to attention, we have inner senses also, to many to be counted, tuned to the reality of God.

Advent can be the beginning of a great adventure, where, after overcoming many obstacles, we find God and ourselves. We will find God in an infant – eternity bounded by a cradle – and that will teach us that there is in ourselves a vast potential, despite our limitations, a magnificent promise, because the Son of God in sharing our human life shares with us his heavenly inheritance. So, in looking forward to the end of time on this first Sunday of Advent, we are not trying so much to lift a corner of the veil over the future as trying to uncover, to dis-cover, the present, because as St Paul says in the Second Reading, ‘the time has come’. We must wake up to the reality of the gift of God in our lives, in our mediocre, apparently ungifted lives.

This time of year, there is often a wintry discontent in us that reflects the appearance merely of the natural world around us, rather than the truth that lies hidden beneath a bare earth, with its bones showing. The liturgy of nature has, as its theme, dying and burial with a promise of new life germinating and springing up, and the theme of our liturgy here is the seed of life deep down in us that must grow until it is finally harvested at the Lord’s return. So the Judgement will be a harvesting, a gathering in of work completed, a prize-giving (to go back to the idea of examinations), with the ‘graduates’ all dressed up and pleased as punch.

A Judgement indeed, but in the sense of revealing fully the judgement God has already made on the evil of the world in the death, but also in the Resurrection, of Christ. And the pain and disappointment will be for those who in the secret intentions of their hearts (cf. I Cor 4:5), where the Spirit of God must rule, have refused to submit to his guidance.

In the religious language of Jesus’ day, the Final Judgement was described as something hidden and unpredictable and catastrophic – ‘one is taken, another is left’. God’s action comes from outside the world, like lightning from the sky, uncontrollable, hitting one person, leaving a companion untouched. It’s a dramatic way of saying that the conclusion to this world’s history is in God’s hands, not ours. But the Gospel talks also of those who ignored the warnings their own reflective judgement on their lives would have given. People continue in every age to devote themselves only to worldly concerns, ‘eating and drinking’, as the Gospel says, but not realising that money fails, power decays, reputations fade away, and in the end there is nothing but our inner selves, stripped of all pretensions, to present before God.

Advent is meant to create in us a special mood, a way of thinking about life. We are people who look forward to a happy conclusion to our story and that of the world, and we do so because we know that Christ not only will come to show himself as Judge, and conqueror of evil, but has come and made the authentic life of the Kingdom present in the world, and comes continually in the power of his Spirit. From day to day he enables us to side with him in the conflict between good and evil in the innermost secrecy of our lives, where for now his judgement takes the form of the healing action of the Spirit.

The time is now, we must wake up and live as people of the day, as St Paul says, as people who welcome the light of Christ shining in the inmost recesses of our being. Then we will be ready to meet him when he comes, in the Feast of Christmas and at the Judgement.