HOMILY FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT– YEAR B

Rev. Fr. (Dr.) Osmond Anike

Readings:

First Reading: Isaiah 63:16-17, 64:1, 3-8 – O that you would tear the heavens open and come down

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 79(80):2-3, 15-16, 18-19 – God of hosts, bring us back; let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.

Second Reading:1 Corinthians 1:3-9 – We are waiting for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.

Gospel: Mark 13:33-37 – If he comes unexpectedly, he must not find you asleep.

Advent, as we all know, is the four-week season that begins our liturgical year; a period in which we are called upon to prepare ourselves properly for the coming feast of our Lord’s birth. The word “advent” simply means “coming”; and in this sense, the coming of Christ our Redeemer. When we talk of the coming of Christ, we should note that there are three different kinds of his coming: The first kind is his coming as a child in Bethlehem through his birth some 2000 years ago; the second kind is his second coming at the end of the world (the famous Parousia); and the third kind is the Lord’s coming into our hearts by divine grace. Most of the time, people focus on the first and the second types of the coming of Christ and tend to forget the third type. In reality, though, the first and the second type can only be useful to us as Christians if and only if we make room for the third coming by opening our individual hearts to receive him. If this is not done, then the first coming of Christ will simply pass as a mere historical event, and the second as a theological speculation. To benefit from the first and the second comings of Christ, we have to focus on what lies in-between namely, how we should open our hearts to receive him daily in our lives. This is the only way his advent will become meaningful to us.

As a season that begins our liturgical year, advent begins with us looking at the eventual end of the world. In the Gospel of Mark of today, Jesus bids us to be on our guard and stay awake because we never know when the time will come. The Gospel is thus already anticipating the end of the world while we are just beginning a new liturgical year. A critical reader will question why this is so. But a careful observation of human activities will notice that this is not out of place. There is no human work, no project, and no journey, which begins without the end in view. It is the end that determines the path one has to follow. This is commonly called planning; and it is part and parcel of every human endeavour. If one is constructing a house, the anticipated final size of the house (the end) will determine the depth and solidity of the foundation (the beginning). The same applies to our spiritual lives: our final goal must have to determine our present mode of life. This is why, at the beginning of our liturgical year, we are already being urged to stay awake for that final moment that will come.

The injunction to “stay awake” is a two-dimensional call from Jesus: it is a call to wakefulness; and, it is a call to wait. First, Jesus understands, as Anthony de Mello loves to put it, that most people are asleep even though they don’t know it. De Mello insists that spirituality means waking up. Behind his riddle that many people are born asleep, live asleep, marry in their sleep, breed children in their sleep, and die in their sleep without ever waking up, is an underlying truth that having one’s eyes open does not necessarily mean that one is awake. People suffer because they live in a dream world. In fact, this is the cause of all suffering. But curiously, most people don’t want to wake up to reality. They keep on playing with their toys like kids in the kindergarten because it gives them momentary pleasure. Waking up is unpleasant, literally. People prefer to stay in bed and continue their dream. Because of this, reality is not real to them; the only world they know is the dream world. And when such dream world confronts reality, they experience suffering. Instead of coming to terms with reality, they run back to their dream world, to their comfort zone, and resume their hallucination. If you wish to master yourself and the universe, you must first wake up. You cannot continue to build castles in your dream. Dreamworld is not real; it does not exist. When Jesus therefore says, “stay awake!” he is inviting us to come to reality with the present. Jesus was the most awake person that has ever existed. He was moving from present to present without ever allowing himself to be distracted by the past and the future. He stayed awake throughout; and that was why he was as clear-sighted as ever. He was able to conquer temptations because he was awake; he was able to go through sufferings without being depressed because he was awake; he was able to make correct judgments because he was awake; he was able to practice compassion because he was awake to the sufferings of people around him. Because he was awake, his life was simply a life of awareness. He mastered the world around him. And this is exactly what he wants us to do: to stay awake and master the world around us.

The other dimension of Jesus’ injunction to stay awake is a call to wait. There is this element of waiting in human affairs that are often neglected. But, using the famer as a case study, one notices how he applies this element of patience and waiting between the planting period and the reaping period. No famer plants today and harvests today. There has to be a period of waiting for the crop to germinate, mature and bear fruits. In-between these periods, the farmer stays awake to tend the crop, to water it, to weed around it, and to inspect whether the fruits are ripen enough for harvesting. This element of waiting is actually what the season of Advent proposes. Unfortunately, in our so-called jet age, we are too much in a hurry to wait. We think that the faster, the better. But this is not the whole story. We might be moving fast, but generally we don’t know where we are going. And this is the tragedy of our age. There is this story of an absent-minded professor who was running late for a lecture. He jumped into a cab and asked the driver to drive fast. A few metres into the drive, he yelled again at the driver to drive faster. At full throttle, the driver zoomed off and was soon driving at a 150 km/h in the highway completely away from the university. Realizing that they had already passed the campus gate and were heading out of town, the professor asked the driver, “Where are you going?” to which he replied, “I don’t know sir, but I am driving as fast as I can”. The season of Advent is a period in which we are called upon to slow down, stay awake and wait.

Jesus comes into the hearts of those who are awake; and the Holy Spirit descends on those who hearken to the instructions of Jesus to wait in the Upper Room. If we desire to receive Jesus in our hearts, we must learn to stay awake and master the world around us; and we must wait patiently like a farmer waiting for his crops to bear fruit before harvesting them.