Therefore, Stay Awake! Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent, Year A (Matthew 24:37-44)
Francis Mangeni
We have started a brand-new Liturgical Year, Year A, when we shall be reflecting on the Gospel of Matthew. We start the Liturgical Year with the Liturgical Season of Advent, which is a period of preparation and waiting. It is a short season, with only four Sundays, and four candles. It goes fast. And then comes the blast of Christmas, when we mightily party, celebrating God’s physical arrival in our midst; the Nativity of our Lord (Jn 1:14, Mt 1:18-25, Lk 2:1-20). We can already live the Spirit of Christmas, of love and giving.
The first point of reflection during this Advent Season is staying awake. We are to stay awake as we await the coming of our Lord. But why, how and when does the Lord come?
The first reading (Isaiah 2:1-5) is very famous indeed. It tells us of humankind’s inner longing for the good. It is a longing for wisdom, beauty, peace, and justice. Going to the house of the Lord, the mountain of the Lord; being taught by the Lord, knowing God’s Law; living in peace as joyful tranquillity and as stability and security ordered to justice and goodness; these are the core desires of humankind over the millennia. These are also our desires as individuals, at a very personal level, for we are restless until our hearts rest in God, as St. Augustine has taught us (Confessions 1,1.5). We long for wholeness, and only God satisfies that longing. This is why the Lord comes. He comes to make us whole. He wants to make us whole because He made us, in total love, in His image, for we have seen Jesus as a human and He is God, and He wishes to make His home with us (Ps 24, 139; Jn 3:16, 14:9, 14:23). God is love (1 Jn 4:8).
“They will beat their swords into ploughshares into and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” (v.4). This is humankind’s cri de coeur, and it greets us at the United Nations, which Pope St. Paul VI had great hopes for in his Populorum Progressio 1967 as part of the solution to the world’s problems when he called for integral human development, full-bodied humanism, genuine bonds between nations, and a global human community of free people (nos. 14, 22, 42-43, 47); or a global human community living a civilisation of love, as the Church has taught over the years (Gaudium et Spes).
The Lord has come into the world at the nativity, just over 2000 years ago. How time flies! It might seem like a long time ago, but in the long arc of geography, which runs in millions and billions of years, that was only yesterday. We have since had Tradition, through the successors of St. Peter, our Popes, and the witness of the Martyrs and Saints, as well as the lives and writings of the Fathers, that traces our Faith right back to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself during His earthly life. He announced the Kingdom, and commissioned St. Peter and the Apostles, and through the Holy Spirit manifested the Church at Pentecost. Since then, the Gospel is to be preached up to the remotest ends of the world (Mt 4:17, 16:18, 28:16-20; Acts 1:8, 2:1-39). So, the first way our Lord comes is in history, during his earthly pre-resurrection life. We have commemorated this since 25 December 336 AD, when we formally started celebrating the Nativity of the Lord.
The second way is that we meet our Lord in Scripture, in the word of God, which tells of God in history and specifically of Christ’s earthly life as for our sake. When therefore we reflect on Scripture and share the word of God, God comes to us and we are to be awake to meet Him; listening and hearing with our hearts and minds. The third way the Lord comes to us is in the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, which our Lord instituted Himself (Mt 26:26-28). Further to the words of Scripture, the Eucharistic miracles over the centuries attest to the real presence of Christ in the species: miracoli Eucaristici – Mostra Internazionale Ideata e Realizzata da Carlo Acutis e Nicola Gori.
The Lord also comes to us in the daily events, which is the fourth way. When we review the day at night prayer, we come to realise how the Lord was with us throughout the day, in the people and the events. The Lord is in the least of the people we come across in our daily lives (Mt 25:40). And reading the signs of the times, we find the Lord speaking to us about what He has accomplished and what He would like us to do. The fifth way the Lord comes is at our end of life, when we face the particular judgment. And the sixth way is at the end of time, when the already-but-yet state of the Kingdom of God will be fully realised.
We are to stay awake, to meet the Lord when He comes to us in all these six ways, for the Lord comes “as in the days of Noah”, in the most ordinary of events, at the most ordinary of times, even unexpectedly (Mt 24:38-39). The first reading stops just before launching into the travesties of the People of Israel, who had abandoned God and fallen into grave sins of idolatry. We too have the propensity to sin. But God pleads with us to walk in His light (Is 2:5), for He alone satisfies our deepest longing and desires, making us whole. And as our inner longing, it is a desire for God. It is love for God. To the extent that we seek our perfection, we seek the good. And as St. Thomas Aquinas taught, “All things by desiring their own perfection, desire God” (I, Q6.a.2). It is a longing for home, for our permanent Jerusalem; it is a longing for a kingdom, for God’s reign (Ps 122).
And how do we stay awake? St Paul tells us in the second reading that we stay awake by putting on Christ (Rom 13:11-14). As with the incarnation (Jn 1:14), we are to receive Christ and let Him be incarnated in us (Jn 15:4), and be with us always until the end of time (Mt 28:20). We are to cling to him in love, and be of one substance with Him. In His human nature, Christ is consubstantial with us. In his divine nature, Christ is consubstantial with the Father. We are to be crucified with Christ and die to ourselves, so that it is only Christ who lives in us (Gal 2:20). We are to have the heart and mind of Christ, to think His thoughts, to think like Him (Phil 2:5). And through baptism, the Holy Spirit lives in us, forever (Jn 3:3, 3:5-6, 14:16; 1 Cor 6:19-20).
The motif of being vested with Christ, of the armor of light, goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve. It is believed that they were dressed in light and grace, but when they disobeyed God through pride, the light and grace departed and they found themselves naked. But in His love and mercy, God did not abandon them but came to them, still longing and searching for them to take them along for an evening walk in the cool of the day. He found them in hiding in shame, and sewed them fig leaves to clothe them, promising them salvation. Christ is the salvation, God intervening, to satisfy that deep, innate longing we have at our core; a longing for fulness that God alone satisfies; that God gives freely. At baptism, the Priest claims us for Christ and puts an indelible character or spiritual mark on us, configuring us to Christ. As the Catechism teaches, “No sin can erase this mark … The Holy Spirit has marked us with the seal of the Lord for the day of redemption. Baptism indeed is the seal of eternal life” (Catechism, 1272, 1274).
And how do we live our citizenship in God’s Kingdom? St Paul tells us that we are to “make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:14, cf Gal 5:19-21), but instead bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), which we do through grace, repeated virtuous acts, habits, and lifestyles, being configured to Christ. And again: “16 Rejoice always, 17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thes 5:16-18).