Awake and Alert

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent (B)

I saw a funny video on the computer yesterday uploaded there by one of the friars as an audio visual aid for his Sunday homily, someone I think many of you know as he preached a retreat here back in 2017. The video shows a young couple walking side by side on a city sidewalk. They are both looking at the screen of their respective cell phones. They are so intent on their phones that the young lady of the pair walks straight into a sign post and is knocked unconscious, her phone flying from her hands and landing a few feet away. The young man never notices that his companion is lying flat on her back on the pavement and continues walking down the street. Obviously, the moral of the video is that staying awake and alert means at the very least being aware of where you are going.

Truth be told, staying awake and alert is a message that we have been hearing in the Scriptures for the past two or three weeks. We hear the message again today as Jesus tells his disciples: “You do not know when the time will come.”

The hymn that we heard this morning is an ancient Gregorian chant for Advent. “Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum.” “Drop down dew, you heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just one. Let the earth be opened and send forth a Savior.” It is a lamentation, a song pleading for God to come and release the people from their distress. Although the words of the hymn are not taken directly from the Scriptures, they do resemble the laments that we read in the Book of Psalms, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, as well as the laments of Job.

Whenever disaster strikes, our first human impulse is to find someone to blame. Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Frequently, this impulse is followed by another with which we are very familiar. We ask why God let it happen. This is very much evident in the oracle from Isaiah that we read today. “Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” They try to turn their guilt into an accusation against God. If God is all-powerful, why does he let these things happen? However, Isaiah quickly comes back to the real reason for their plight. We are sinful. We have become unclean people. No one calls upon God’s name.

Isaiah’s lament, like most laments in the Scriptures, does not let us wallow in our distress. We are suddenly aware of the fact that because we are responsible for the calamities that surround us, we must work our way out of these distressful situations. The Gospel offers us a parable of a man who is traveling abroad and leaves his servants and his gatekeeper in charge of his household. Though the Gospel does not elaborate the duties of the servants, it is clear that they are responsible for the traveler’s home while he is away. They will be expected to account for anything that goes wrong while the master is away and what they did to rectify the situation. When he returns, they must be found awake and alert and busy about their task of caring for his home.

So we too are expected to be busy and responsible and alert while we wait for Jesus to return. God’s household is now our responsibility. Rather than simply sit around and cry out in the face of calamity, it is our responsibility to make things right.

In the second reading, we hear once again the greeting that comes at the beginning of St. Paul’s letters. “Grace to you” is a Greek greeting to which St. Paul adds, “and peace,” the familiar Hebrew “shalom.” He then continues with a brief prayer of thanksgiving expressing gratitude for blessings that were granted in the past to the Corinthians. The greeting and the thanksgiving move to the theological point of the passage; namely, the community is waiting for the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ. We, like them, are still waiting; we are in the “in between time.” Christ has already been born. He has died and risen from the dead, but we believe that the day of his final revelation is yet to come. In the meantime, we live in anticipation of his return and busy ourselves with the responsibility of God’s household which has been placed in our care.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator