Homily on “Stay Awake, Keep Alert, Be on Guard” based on the Gospel of Matthew 24:37-44 and Letter to the Romans 13:11-14:
In Jesus’ time, the problem Jesus faced was NOT that no one was waiting for the Messiah; NOT that NO one was looking for a savior, but the problem was that Jesus turned out to be a different Messiah from what the people were waiting for.
Similarly – our own concepts of what or who God is could be our own obstacle to knowing and encountering God. We could be blinded by our own concepts and prejudiced ideas of what God is – of Who Jesus is; of how God would come into our lives. The truth of the matter is that people did not recognize Jesus then and they do not recognize Him now. Just as John the Baptist declared: “There is one among you whom you do not recognize (Jn 1:26).
As one author wrote: The world did not recognize Jesus then because:
They were looking for a Lion, He came as a Lamb.
They were looking for a Warrior, He came as a Peace maker.
They were looking for a King, He came as a Servant.
They were looking for their temporal needs to be met. He came to meet their eternal needs.
They were looking for Liberation from Rome, He submitted to the Roman Cross.
AND - It is NOT ONLY in terms of WHAT the Messiah will be like but there were and even in our time, there are still misconceptions as to WHEN and HOW the Lord will come.
Do you hear the admonition for this first Sunday of the church’s year? Stay awake! Keep alert! Be on guard! What does that mean?
Sometimes the Second Coming of Christ is spoken of in the New Testament as a grand, cosmic event in which Jesus will descend on clouds from heaven. Trumpets will sound, the dead will be raised, and Christ will return in glory. But - Today we have another image of Christ’s coming. In our Gospel from Matthew, we hear Jesus say that the Lord will come like “a thief in the night.”
Meaning - God comes to us in unexpected, surprising ways. This is actually what we celebrate during Advent and at Christmas?
What the incarnation means for us, and what we celebrate throughout this holy season, is that God is with us.
The Incarnation is actually a scandal to other religions because they cannot accept the truth that the Almighty God can be one of us, with us, in us.
The challenge for us is to be spiritually alert and watchful which is the true meaning of Advent but unfortunately Advent has become an almost routine season. Stay awake! Keep alert! Be on guard! Because - Who knows how God will come when He comes to us?
So – how do we prepare – How do we “Stay awake! Keep alert! Be on guard!”
That’s the challenge for all of us: Our real worry should not be that the world might suddenly end or that we might unexpectedly die, but our concern must be that we might live and die, ASLEEP, so to speak - meaning – that we live and die without really loving, without properly expressing our love, and without tasting deeply the real joy of living because we are so consumed by the business and busy pressures of living that we never quite get around to fully living.
Therefore, we must always “Stay awake! Keep alert! Be on guard!”
Father Anthony DeMello, a Jesuit priest said: Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep, so to speak. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they raise children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. Meaning - They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
You see - being alert, awake, and vigilant in the biblical sense is not a matter of living in fear of the world ending or of our personal lives ending. Rather it is a matter of having love and reconciliation as our chief concerns. It is a matter of being grateful, thanking, appreciating, affirming, forgiving, apologizing, and being more mindful of the joys of living in human community and within the sure embrace of God.
We need to be awake spiritually. Again, the end of the world should NOT concern us, nor should we worry excessively about when we will die. What we should worry about is: IN WHAT STATE our dying will find us.
To give you a practical example:
This is also the season of holiday parties … You can pretty much imagine some people standing in front of their closets – anguishing - with the silent cry, “What am I going to wear?”
From our Second Reading today, St. Paul urges the Romans to find a renewed intimacy with Christ. The metaphor Paul uses for this intimacy is drawn from the closet. The apostle asks his readers to “put on Christ.” To “Put on Christ” means to dress our inner person, not the outer body, and “to put on Christ” is thus a call to place priority on our relationship with God more than our relationships with the world.
When you get dressed each day, for whom are you dressing? Perhaps some of you would answer that you dress only to be comfortable. But most of us would have to admit that much of the effort, and anxiety, we spend over what we are to wear and style - have much more to do with the opinions of those around us. And many of us simply dress in such a way that even the stranger we meet on the street will think well of us if we dress nicely.
But Paul encourages us to dress the inner person with more attention than we give to dressing up our body. To “Put on Christ” is a call to the follower of Christ to hold God as close as an inner garment. St. Paul is telling us to strive to please God, the One who looks upon the heart rather than the face, to dress the soul more carefully than the body. As Thomas Merton observed, “the very desire to please God, pleases God.” It is our highest calling and purpose.
AND “putting on Christ” is also a matter of the way we live in relation to other people… our neighbor.
How do we please God? What are the “garments” of the well-dressed soul? We cannot serve God or love God without also serving and loving our neighbor. Paul was very specific. If we would put on Christ, we must “behave decently;”
– Meaning - We are to enjoy life but in moderation (“not in orgies and drunkenness”);
We are to enjoy relationships of intimacy but within God’s plan for marriage (“not in sexual immorality or lust”)
We are to enjoy honest and real friendships with companions and co-workers (“not in rivalry or jealousy”).
So, what are we going to wear this Advent season? Today is the beginning of our season of introspection, of examining our conscience, of renewing our covenant relationship with God and season of spiritual preparation for the coming of Christ… just as Lent is the season of spiritual preparation for Easter.
Let us dress appropriately spiritually.
Let us clothe our minds with thoughts of repentance.
Let us wrap our hearts in hope for God’s coming. Let us gird our souls in glad service of the poor and powerless for the love of God.
So, when we stand before our packed closets, instead of asking “Which of these clothes should I wear?,” may the Christ who was born in a borrowed cave, wrapped only in a few strips of cloth, and who died on a cross wearing even less, - May He call us to ask the more important question, “Which of these clothes can I give away?”
1ST SUNDAY OF ADVENT – CYCLE A
December 1, 2019
Matthew 24:37-44; Romans 13:11-14
