First Sunday of Advent – December 3, 2023

12-03-2023Weekly ReflectionFr. Timothy Eck

“Be watchful! Be alert!”

In Christ’s exhortation today, it can be quite tempting to place ourselves in the shoes of the person traveling abroad. After all, this current life is a journey to our heavenly home. We speak of our current state as a pilgrimage. And this is certainly true; however, in the context of our Gospel today, we are not the ones on a journey, but instead it is Christ who is on the journey, while we are the ones remaining in the home.

With this in mind, in what home are we remaining? The one traveling is a lord, and there appear to be many servants with many different roles in the home. This is not a small house, but a large manor with many rooms. This house represents the Church, the kingdom of God upon earth. The Lord upon his Ascension left his Church well ordered, with us, his servants, having set roles to maintain this house until his return.

This is the state in which we find ourselves in the present moment, on the watch for the Lord’s coming. It is currently late in the night as we keep our vigil, some two thousand years since Christ’s ascension. The natural world reflects this reality as we journey toward the winter solstice with ever retreating days and deepening nights. But our expectation for this natural darkening to reverse and light to increase once more serves as an icon of our hope for the true return of the Light of the World.

For this is what we are on the lookout for. We are to be like the one we heard in Isaiah, waiting for that great deed of the Lord which “no ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen.” The great expectant hope is that Christ will return and return soon, and finally put to death the final enemy, death itself; that he will finally reconcile all humanity to God and each other; that no longer will we labor under the bondage of sin but walk upright in the freedom of the glory of the children of God. But his deed which is impossible for humanity, a deed which has never been seen or heard, will only be given to “those who wait for him.”

In order to wait for the Lord and his great deeds, we must at a minimum remain within the house and be at home to greet him. Whenever we commit grave sins we leave the home of the Church, we desert our post in the watch tower. For as we heard in Isaiah, our sins make us “like [withered] leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind.” In our sins, the winds of life (particularly the turbulence of the Advent season) blow us away just as the final autumnal gusts disperse the remaining leaves. We must strive that much more during this season to recommit ourselves to God and remain vigilant against that which might led us into sin.

Assuming that we do remain in the house during this season, it is not enough to be simply found within the walls. We must be found awake and doing “[our] own work.” Each of us has a proper role in the body of Christ. Do we know what that is? During this time there are many distractions and temptations. The amount of consumption and focus on materialistic goods leads to a drowsiness of spirit. Sure, we seek to do so for love, and yet how many sins against charity do we commit in our pursuit of the acquisition of things? We long to express our affection, and yet how numbed to God and prayer will we have become come Christmas?

Our spiritual drowsiness comes because we are laboring at tasks which are not asked of us. We are called to be expectantly waiting, not bustling about. As we hear elsewhere in Luke, the master when he returns will “gird himself, have [the vigilant servants] recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.” How lovely would Advent be, if instead of such frenetic haste, we expectantly waited for our Lord’s arrival, an arrival upon which he will serve us, not we him. We need not have the house perfectly sorted or provisioned properly, nor halls decked accordingly. Instead, we are to be like children on the watch, awaiting with ardent love for the return of our Lord.

This Advent season, may we each find time to stop and scan the horizon, looking for the Lord. May we strive to sit in the stillness of the night, lovingly awaiting the arrival of our Lord, that when he does arrive, our souls might leap with joy to open their gates and welcome him within. Amen.