1st Sunday of Advent: Cycle A 22-23
FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 2:1-5 | Romans 13:11-14 | Matthew 24:37-44
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
In the opening prayer, we prayed for something that’s really difficult to fully understand. It’s simply that there is this question of merit. How do you merit eternal life? How do you earn it? How do you do enough for God so that, when he sees you, he’s not filled with anger and resentment and judgment? The theme of the first Sunday of Advent is always the same. It’s about being vigilant, being awake, being alert. I like to call that being conscious. It’s so important for us to live ⎯ if we’re truly interested in a truthful life based in a true spirituality, we have to understand that one of the basic calls of that is to be in touch with reality just as it is, who we are, who God is, what we’re doing, and in that process of getting to connect to that God by reflection, by wondering, by curiosity, so many questions come up. And when we go to scriptures to find answers, it is like almost going to ⎯ I’m going to exaggerate, but it’s like throwing dice to find out whether or not you’re going to be comforted by these words or whether you’re going to be frightened to death, because one of the themes along with vigilance and being awake and alert is this image of judgment. And I really want to talk about that, because it’s so tricky, the word judgment. Judgment could be just simply deciding what’s right and wrong. I judge my ideas with a kind of logical process and say, “That’ll work,” or, “This won’t work.” But judgment, when it comes between people, also sounds very much like a condemnation or a rejection of them, and it’s really hard for me to believe, after reading the New Testament, after understanding, through my Catholic faith, the work of God in my life as a Father who created me, as a Son who redeemed and forgives all my sins and as a Holy Spirit who is there to fight my cause when, if I stay with the image of a judgment at the end of my life, there’s my lawyer, my Holy Spirit, God himself fighting for my salvation, in a sense, proving that I’m worthy, not because of my performance, not because of what I’ve done, because of who God is ⎯ who God is.
So let’s take a moment to look at that, who God is. If the Old Testament God is too present in your life, you’ll find that you’ll be looking carefully, maybe too carefully for perfection, because one of the things in the Old Testament about God is that human beings felt that they were imperfect by nature and that they, if they got close to God, would be destroyed, because he was perfection. It’s like this image of perfection in God is absolutely contrary and completely separate and non-compatible with human brokenness, with our desire, with our longings, with passion, with self-will. Interesting that we have that strong, strong notion of that kind of God that is so distant, and yet we find out, as we watch this God throughout the Old Testament reveal himself differently than the other gods, and we keep seeing this general progression into a God who is more listening to people than demanding from them, pays attention to when they cry out and say, “Don’t do this to us. We don’t deserve this. Please, help us.” And he changes his mind, particularly when Moses said, “Please, God, don’t destroy the Israelites because of their unfaithfulness.” He doesn’t. But that’s just the beginning of a glimmer of something that God is fully going to reveal in Jesus, and that is that, when we look into the life of God in Jesus, and they’re the same, we see the most beautiful image of a God that we could be attracted to and long to be close to. But it often gets hindered by the Old Testament, by images that are, in some ways, very attractive to anyone in a position that I’m in right now. If I’m trying to get you to open your mind and heart to a God who wants to show you where you are and expose to you your weaknesses and faults. If I do that with the motive that, if you just look at them and change, you will be changed. Otherwise, you will be condemned. You’ll be left. That image in the gospel is tricky. When God comes, some will be taken; some will be left. Does that mean some will be condemned, and some will be saved? Maybe. There’s certainly a strong tradition that, when God comes back fully ⎯ when Jesus comes back fully, he’s going to be someone who is there to say, “Okay, this is the final judgment, and everybody that isn’t really who they should have been is going to go to hell, and all those that struggled and found some kind of form of perfection will be saved.” It just flies in the face of everything in the ministry of Jesus. Why did he come into the world? To reveal who the Father is. It was God’s will that he reveal himself finally in Jesus, and we see in this God/man compassion, understanding, forgiveness, patience, love, commitment to us, going when we’re lost to find us, not to condemn us.
Why is it that we fall into the trap of getting caught in shame? Because we are so drawn to look at the negative side of who we are and not what caused it and not what else is good in us, and that’s the thing that I’m longing for you, during this new liturgical year, when we focus on the gospel of Matthew, to be so open to the realization of a God who ministers, who serves, who is there for you. So the idea of merit is really, really something that you want to be careful with. We don’t merit forgiveness. It is a free gift, but the most important thing in the gospel about forgiveness is, unless we recognize our need for it, then it doesn’t have the ability to do the work it does. And when I’m thinking about that, I’m thinking of to face God ultimately at the end of our life, will we look at a God and be thinking that he is a judgmental, demanding, critical God, or will we be looking at someone who, when we see him seeing us, all we see in his eyes and his heart is love and forgiveness and patience? So often we find in Christians a judgmental spirit, and you often wonder where it comes from. But I think it comes from the fact that they expect something like that from God, and so unconsciously, they end up being like the God they think is going to face them, and they are as critical and judgmental on themselves as they imagine God might be. And then that just gets transmitted into a way of treating everybody around us. What a tragic way to misunderstand this beautiful image of God the Father, creator, God the Son, redeemer, most especially God the helper, who is there to fight for us, work for us, do everything he can to bring us into a place of great peace.
There is images in the readings about, in the first reading particularly, about Mount Zion and about Jerusalem. These are the places where they believed that God dwelt, and having God dwell in a place was very common for most of the gods in the time that the Old Testament was written. So they had a kind of location. So there was something beautiful about Zion, something beautiful about Jerusalem, to come, that these would be the dwelling places of God, and one could go there and pray to those images and pray that they would be somehow able to help them. And then there is this explosion of love where this presence that was on Mount Zion, the presence that was coming from the mouth of Moses in the Old Testament, the presence of God in the Holy of Holies in the temple. All of that gets shattered and broken open into a place where God says, “I live inside of you. I’m part of you. I dwell in you, not as a judge, not as someone who’s constantly there saying, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do that.’” Noah is one who said, “Open your eyes. See what you did just then? Look at this. See what you did there?” Now think about you. Who are you? What is really in you that makes you happy, that brings you peace? Is it the things you take, or is it the things you give? Is it the things you judge and condemn, or is it the things that you forgive and surrender to and accept? What an interesting tension in religion, to go from one extreme to the other. Maybe that’s why we have an Old Testament and a New Testament.
But all I long for you to do during this wonderful season as we prepare for the birth of Christ ⎯ we’ll be focusing on Matthew’s gospel throughout this coming year, but my prayer is that you grow in this consciousness of a God who is forgiveness, who is patience, who is love. And I don’t know how to explain what it’s going to be like when you see God, but all I can tell you is, if you think of him looking at you disappointed and angry, then I think there’s something wrong, because he knows everything that happened to you. He knows all the things that made you into who you are, and he knew the person that he created. And that person he created was good in its core, and that’s what he wants to celebrate at our death, when we enter into the kingdom, the things that we did do. Maybe what the judgment is, look at all the things you did that you didn’t even know that you were doing, and that will be true for so many people that live in shame and anger and fear. So don’t think of the judgment as something that’s going to nail you for your sins but something that’s going to free you for the surprising ways in which God has used you and transformed you. God bless you.
Father, it’s difficult for us to understand the depth of your love. Human love is so often conditional, not always but many times, and we have a darkness in us about that power that you have to save or to condemn. But bless us with a deep awareness of what loves really means and what it is like when we experience it coming from the perfection of love, understanding and compassion and forgiveness. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.