Advent, St. Andrew and the Jubilee of Hope, First Sunday of Advent (A), November 30, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
First Sunday of Advent, Year A
November 30, 2025
Is 2:1-5, Ps 122, Rom 13:11-14, Mt 24:37-44

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following text guided the homily: 

• We begin today, on this first Sunday of Advent, a new liturgical year, which is meant to give us all a new spiritual start. But this Advent is special, for two reasons.
• The first is that it is taking place during the Jubilee of Hope. Advent is a special season of hope, in which, pondering the reality and meaning of Jesus’ first coming in Bethlehem, we run forth to meet him now in all the ways he comes to us — in prayer, in the Sacraments, in his holy Word, in others — and get ready like the wise virgins in Jesus’ Gospel parable (Matt 25:1-14) to sprint out to meet him with lamps lit when he comes at the end of time, or the end of our life, whichever comes first. For Missionaries of Charity, indeed for all religious, your whole life is meant to be a living Advent. John Paul II said that “the role of consecrated life” is to be “an eschatological sign” (Vita Consecrata 26), an anticipation of the life to come. It’s supposed to be a musical crescendo, chanting more loudly and more beautifully each Advent, “O Come, Divine Messiah!,” “O Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” “O Come, O Come Emmanuel!” You’re supposed to show us, St. John Paul II, that “‘here we have no lasting city’ (Heb 13:14), for ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (Phil 3:20), [and that] the ‘one thing necessary’ is to seek God’s ‘Kingdom and his righteousness’ (Mt 6:33), with unceasing prayer for the Lord’s coming” (VC 26). Your lives of perpetual Advent is supposed to help everyone in the Church live with greater hope for God, for the Kingdom of Heaven, for the definitive fulfillment of all Christ’s promises. You are supposed to wake up the world and keep the world awake amidst the passing realities. The beginning of every new liturgical year is a time for renewal and recalibration in your eschatological vocations.
• The second thing that is different this year is that the first Sunday of Advent takes place on the feast of St. Andrew. Normally, we wouldn’t mark it, but today, Pope Leo, the successor of St. Peter, is in Istanbul, Turkey, with Patriarch Bartholomew, the successor of St. Andrew — at this very hour, they’re having lunch together at the conclusion of Pope Leo’s time in Turkey — and hence it’s fitting today to honor the brother of St. Peter and look at his life as a great figure of Advent. St. Andrew was someone who longed for the Messiah, who hungered for him, who drew close to St. John the Baptist as the Elijah and precursor of the Anointed and Awaited One, and became a faithful follower once that Messiah was pointed out. Together with almost certainly St. John, Andrew immediately began to follow Jesus, entered into conversation with him, came and saw where he was staying, and was changed forever. St. Andrew then spent his life, like John the Baptist, as an Advent announcer, preparing people to embrace Jesus as the Christ. As soon as he was able to travel after the completion of the Sabbath, he ran to his brother Simon and announced, “We have found the Messiah!” and brought Simon to Jesus. Little did Andrew know what Jesus’ plans would have been for his brother, that he would become the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church, the one to whom he would give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. All he did was bring Simon to Jesus and Jesus did the rest. Similarly, he brought the young boy with the five loaves and two fish to Jesus, who took those meager materials and — in a Messianic foreshadowing of the Eucharist on earth and the eternal banquet in heaven — multiplied them to feed the vast throng to more than satiation. He finally brought the Greeks who wished to see Jesus (Jn 12:20-24) to him and that was the trigger for Jesus’ Messianic hour when the Son of Man would be glorified by his being lifted up in crucifixion and resurrection (Jn 12:20-24). St. Andrew was — like you’re called to be, sisters — an Advent sign, someone who pointed to Jesus, the long-awaited anointed one, the one for whom the heart of every Jew, and more broadly of every human being, has been created to beat. And just as much as Andrew responded to the fulfillment of that first Advent by bringing others still waiting to Christ, so we’re sent out every Advent, as “fishers of men” like the apostle, to bring others — including, like in Andrews’ life, family members, young people, and even seekers from other countries — to meet Jesus. Christ comes for all and in Advent we seek to bring him all.
• The Jubilee of Hope and the Feast of St. Andrew help us to adopt better and more profoundly the attitude God wants us to have as we begin with this season of Advent. At the start of this new liturgical year, something that blends both kairos and chronos, we can ask, “What time is it?, and St. Paul replies in today’s second reading: “You know the time. It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” The whole Jubilee has been ultimately to wake us up to reality of Jesus’ being with us now, as a result of his birth, as a result of the sacraments, and the reality that he is coming again, and wants us to be as alert for his arrival as St. Andrew was at the Jordan. Advent is a time of spiritual reawakening, as we return to what should be the proper foundation of our life. In it, we retrace the centuries long waiting of the Jews for Jesus’ first coming so that we might learn from them how to stoke our hunger for Jesus’ second coming. Rather than sleep through the gift of life, we go out to meet Christ the Bridegroom like the five wise bridesmaids, to enter into his victory feast. Sometimes many of us spiritually are like slumbering teenage boys for whom you need a bucket of ice water to get them out of bed! We hit the snooze button on the Lord’s calling us to become fully alive. Advent is like a set of spiritual defibrillating pads meant to jolt us out of the spiritual comas into which out of weakness we can fall. So Advent is first a time to wake up.
• Second, it’s a time of excitement. Salvation, St. Paul says today, is nearer to us that when we became believers. It’s nearer to us because we’re a full-year closer to meeting Christ face-to-face at his second coming or at the end of our life. Advent is a time when we look ahead, with truly Christian joy, hope and eagerness, to Christ’s second coming. Salvation is nearer to us now than last first Sunday of Advent. That’s something that should get us more excited than the most energetic sports fan for their favorite team’s winning a championship. We get excited by stoking our love for God, for his promises, for heaven, for holiness, for happiness. This requires a choice to start placing our heart more where our true treasure ought to be.
• Third, Advent is a time of journeying. Christ is indeed coming and we are called not to stay where we are, but to journey toward him and journey with him. In today’s opening prayer, we turned to God the Father and asked him to grant us “the resolve to run forth to meet” Christ “with righteous deeds at his coming.” Advent is the gun at the beginning of a race that gets us to begin a spiritual sprint, to go with haste, to meet Christ as he comes. Isaiah in today’s first reading, looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, compared Advent to a spirited and speedy hike: “Come, let us climb the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.” Advent is a time for an uphill exertion to meet the Lord, to learn his ways more deeply and begin to walk in them more faithfully. Isaiah says, “The mountain of the Lord shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills,” which is an indication that the Lord should be our highest priority, Someone that towers over all other goods, as we strive to achieve the summit of Christian life and respond to Isaiah’s and the Church’s summons, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!” At a practical level, Advent is a time when we make the exertion to go meet Christ in prayer, to receive him, if we can, at daily Mass, to be forgiven by him in a good and devout Confession, to spend time before him in loving adoration, to embrace and serve him in the disguise of our neighbor in need, and to follow in his footsteps by walking with him on the holy, exciting, luminescent adventure of faith.
• So Advent, in short, is a time of hope when we, like Andrew before us, get up, get excited, and get moving. We know that none of these verbs happen without a subject. They demand our free choice. Advent is the time God helps us recalibrate our whole life and make resolutions to give him his proper place.
• Jesus teaches us in today’s Gospel that there are great stakes in whether we wake up, get excited and make that journey. At the time of Noah and the great flood, Jesus says, there were only a few alert to what was really going on and the rest perished. So, he says, unfortunately, the same thing will happen at his second coming. Two, he noted, will be working in the field, one will be taken, the other left; two will be preparing food in the kitchen, one will be taken, the other left. In St. Luke’s account, Jesus adds, “There will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left.” Jesus describes that two people doing the same thing at the same time will have two totally different outcomes. We might add, according to the same logic, that two priests will be celebrating Mass; one will go with Jesus and the other left behind. Two religious will be in the chapel, one will be taken and the other abandoned. That doesn’t mean that the decision over our ultimate destiny is going to be arbitrary, as if God is just going to flip a coin and determine who heads with him to eternal happiness and who gets left alienated from him forever. The ones who will go with the Lord will be those who are not asleep, who are not dead to what really matters, but awake and alive. They’ll be the ones who are excited for the things of God rather than who treat what God asks of us as a burden and life with him as a boring imposition. Those taken will be the ones who seek God, who are striving to grow spiritually, rather than being content with doing the minimum. They will be those making the effort to climb the mountain of the Lord rather than other hills, who are making the effort to come to meet him, and who even when they’re working the fields, or grinding meal in the kitchen, or resting in bed are seeking to unite their whole life to him. They will ultimately be the ones who are living with hope, who are stoking their hope, who, like St. Andrew, are exciting others to hope.
• Jesus today uses an analogy of the owner of a house who stays awake and alert so that his house doesn’t get broken into. Advent is like a burglar alarm that goes off to reawaken us to the reality that there is a burglar (the devil) who is out to steal or get us to waste the treasure of our soul. Perhaps even better, Advent is like an alarm clock that helps us wake up from our dream world so that we might seize the gift of the day and whole new year God has given us during which he wants to love us and strengthen us to use the talents he’s lent us to help him redeem the world. Advent is a dynamic season meant to feature a double-desire — Christ’s thirst for us and our thirst for him — and a triple movement: Christ’s journeying toward us; our going out of ourselves, out of comfort zones, out of our old habits, to meet him; and then, transformed by him, journeying with him all the way to his eternal embrace. Advent is a time of conversion, of turning away from sin, turning toward God, and then turning with God full-time.
• Paul tells us in the second reading that Advent is a time to “throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” When St. Augustine read these words, they spoke right to his heart and helped him find the courage to take the last steps on the path of conversion. You remember that he wanted to serve God but couldn’t give up his sexual sins. He’d pray with a vague desire to God, “Give me chastity, but not yet.” But after hearing what was likely an angel encouraging him to “take up and read” Sacred Scripture, he picked up the Bible providentially to this passage and heard the Lord through St. Paul say to him, “Let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and lust, not in rivalry and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.” The great twentieth-century English convert, priest and author Msgr. Ronald Knox commented that most of us approach Advent in the same way the pre-converted Augustine did the virtue of chastity. We say, “We want our Lord to come, but not just yet.” The reason that we prefer him to wait is because we don’t want our life to change as fully as we know God wants. We don’t want to die to the parts of our lives that are not yet full of God’s light. We want to remain in control, because we don’t trust God yet enough to lead us in light up his holy mountain. But God this Advent wants to give us a conversion as profound as St. Andrew’s in 30 AD and St. Augustine’s in 386. He wants to protect us with the armor of light and help us clothe ourselves with his virtues, his thoughts, and his desires. The spiritual new year we begin today is a time of setting “New Year’s Resolutions” and responding to God’s help to keep them so that we might in fact stay alert, excited and moving. That way, no matter when the Lord comes, we’ll never find him a thief but a Friend. That way he’ll never catch us off-guard but find us ready to continue with him the journey we have been seeking to walk with him each day. That way he’ll find us full of hope and desiring above all his kingdom and eternal life (CCC 1817).
• For Catholics, every Mass is meant to be a little Advent, when we run forth to the “fulfillment of our blessed hope, the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” More than any place, this is where we are supposed to wake up and become alive and alert for the presence of God in our life and world. This is where the Holy Spirit comes to try to help us and our brothers and sisters to become genuinely excited about our faith. This is where we go out to encounter the Lord Jesus who comes to meet us and lead us in light to the highest mountain of all, the celestial Jerusalem. Today, as we begin that journey, we rejoice that we have come to the house of the Lord where Christ teaches us his ways and helps us to walk in his paths. What time is it? It’s time to get up, get excited, and get moving. Emmanuel is coming. Let us go out full of hope, and, like Andrew, encourage others to go out with us, to meet Jesus with all the love and excitement we can muster.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
IS 2:1-5

Podcast: Play in new window | Download