One Day Nearer

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent

For many people, the Christmas season has already begun. Nightly news reports are filled with films of people lining up in shopping malls while economists predict that this Christmas season will see retail sales skyrocket now that the pandemic is allowing people to shop in person rather than through the Internet. The day after Thanksgiving has been dubbed Black Friday, and tomorrow is now known as Cyber Monday. The four weeks that precede the celebration of the Nativity of Christ are used by the Church to commemorate thousands of years which saw God’s plan of salvation unfold. In order to appreciate Christmas, we need Advent.

In his book, “The Three Comings of Christ,” Mike Pacer writes: “Why did God become one like us? Advent answers this question and provides the context necessary to understand the Incarnation. Therefore, celebrating Christmas without first observing Advent would be like giving birth without first being pregnant or receiving the trophy before running the race.” The children of Israel waited 2,000 years for the coming of the Messiah. As we prepare for the celebration of his birth, the Church asks us to look to our ancestors and to the texts that they have left behind as a preparation for his Second Coming.

The Prophet Isaiah has been called the “Shakespeare of the prophets.” He is a poet and a visionary. The passage we proclaim today reveals one of his visions, a vision that was sent by God. He was not dreaming or making this up. He was seeing things, but those things were real. They were the real future. What he saw was a whole world of saints, from all the nations in the world, together worshiping the same God, the true God, in great joy that demanded exclamation points. He saw a world without war. Does that sound like our world? Far from it. Isaiah’s vision is of the world after Christ’s return. It will happen just as truly as the first coming, his first advent, the first Christmas, really happened. This vision is a promise that God makes to us, and God’s promises are true because God is faithful.

The three comings of Christ – first into the world of the past, second into our souls and lives in the present, and third in his second coming at the end of the world – all this changes the meaning of time. It brings eternity into history, brings the eternal “now” into the temporal “now.” That’s why St. Paul says, “It is the hour now for you to a wake from sleep.” Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The completion of our salvation is coming. He is coming! We are one day closer to that day today than we were yesterday as the old hymn says: “One sweetly, solemn thought comes to me o’er and o’er; I’m one day nearer home today than e’er I was before.”

St. Paul offers us some practical advice on how to prepare for Christ’s coming, our great meeting with God, which will happen at the end of the world for the whole human race and which will happen to each one of us at our death. The way to prepare to meet God is by what St. Paul calls “casting off the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light.” He compares this to casting off old clothes and putting on new ones when he says “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.” This means that we must leave behind our “selfie” obsession so that we can look at God and God’s love for us and perceive the light that comes from God to you and me.

The Gospel passage which we proclaim today comes down to three simple points: Jesus is coming back; we do not know when; and we had better be ready. When we realize that our future, our eternal life, depends upon being ready when Christ comes to us – be it at the end of the world or at the end of our lives – we come to the conclusion that nothing could be more important. At that moment, what will have to say to Jesus? The parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector gives us two options. Like the Pharisee, we might say, “Look how good I am”; or we could echo the words of the tax collector, “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”