Salvation is Nearer Now Than When We First Believed, First Sunday of Advent (A), November 27, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
First Sunday of Advent, Year A
November 27, 2022
Is 2:1-5, Ps 122, Rom 13:11-14, Mt 24:37-44

To listen to an audio recording of this 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 a new spiritual start. The attitude God wants us to have as we begin with this season of Advent the new liturgical year is given to us by St. Paul in today’s second reading. “What time is it?,” we can ask, and St. Paul replies today: “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.”
• Advent is a time of spiritual reawakening, as we return to what should be the proper foundation of our life — Christ himself — and build our life on him, recognizing that his coming for us at the end of our life is drawing nearer. We began Mass today singing a classic hymn about this spirituality of Advent awakening, famously set to music by Bach himself. Let’s ponder the words: “Wake, O wake, and sleep no longer, for he who calls you is no stranger: awake, God’s own Jerusalem! Hear, the midnight bells are chiming the signal for his royal coming: let voice to voice announce his name! We feel his footstep near, the Bridegroom at the door. Alleluia! The lamps will shine with light divine as Christ the savior comes to reign. … Zion hears the sound of singing; her heart is thrilled with sudden longing: she stirs, and wakes, and stands prepared. Christ her friend, and lord, and lover, her star and sun and strong redeemer, at last his mighty voice is heard. The Son of God has come to make with us his home: sing Hosanna! The fight is won, the feast begun; we fix our eyes on Christ alone.” In Advent we enter into the centuries long waiting of the Jews for Jesus’ first coming so that we might learn that 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 in Jesus’ parable, to enter into his victory feast and fix our eyes on him. 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. We know ways we should make God more and more our priority, but we put it off to later. 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, 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 the end of our life. Advent is a time when we not only look to the past, to Jesus’ coming in Bethlehem. It’s not merely a time when we look toward Jesus in the present, as he comes to us to teach us by his Word, feed us with his body and blood, forgive us in the Sacrament of Penance, and guide us each day through prayer. It’s also a time when we look ahead, not with anti-Christian dread, but with truly Christian joy, hope and eagerness, to Christ’s second coming. Salvation is nearer to us now than last first Sunday of Advent, than the day of our confirmation and first communion, than the day of our baptism! That’s something that should get us more excited than the most energetic sports fan for a World Cup, or Super Bowl or World Series 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.
• The excitement we’re supposed to have is portrayed very well by one of my favorite authors, the great philosopher, theologian and apologist Peter Kreeft, who wrote recently in a new book that many “think of Advent primarily in terms of Christmas, as an anticipation of Christmas, which is Christ’s first coming into the world. Okay, but when we do, perhaps we can learn something from our kids.” Because there are no young kids present here we can continue with his words: “They are happy and excited because they think Santa Claus is coming. Well, he isn’t, but the real Santa, the real saint, is coming, and his name is Jesus. So why aren’t we as happy about his coming as our kids are about Santa Claus coming?” He then makes several contrasts to drive home the point: “Santa Claus comes from the North Pole, but Jesus comes from heaven. Santa Claus comes with eight flying reindeer, but Jesus comes with legions of angels. Santa Claus comes for kids, but Jesus comes for everybody. Santa Claus comes down your chimney and into your living room, but Jesus comes through your faith and into your living. Santa’s gifts are earthly toys that last for a few months or years, but Jesus’ gifts are heavenly joys that last for eternity. Santa doesn’t take you back to his home at the North Pole, but Jesus wants to take you back up to his home in heaven.” Then he comes to the punch line: “Santa Claus isn’t really coming, but Jesus is. So why aren’t we more happy about Jesus coming than our kids are about Santa Claus coming?” The point is that we should be way more excited for Jesus’ second coming than we were as children for Santa. We should be far more excited about the supernatural gifts God gives us that children today are for what Santa leaves under the tree. Excitement for the fulfillment of our longing is the second part of Advent spirituality.
• Third, Advent is a time of journeying. Christ is coming — the term Advent means “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 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 faithfully. Isaiah says the “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, something that towers over all other goods, as we see to come to 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!” And so at a practical level, Advent is a time when we make the effort to go meet Christ, to meet him 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 when we get up, get excited, and get moving. We know that none of these things just happen to us. They require our will. 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. 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 gets taken by 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.
• Jesus 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 double movement, Christ’s journeying toward us and our going out of ourselves, out of comfort zones, out of our old habits, to meet him. It’s 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 finalize the path of conversion. You remember that he desires to serve God but who 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.” There are still people today, young and old, who need to read and heed God’s clear call to conversion with regard to the sins St. Paul mentions that had kept St. Augustine in the darkness. But I’d like to apply them more generally to Advent. 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 at the steering wheel, 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. Augustine’s in 386. He wants to protect us with the armor of light and help us clothe ourselves with his virtues, his thoughts, 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. So I’d encourage you not to leave Church today without such resolutions to make this Advent, indeed this new year, the best of your life, a true Year of the Lord.
• For Catholics, every Mass is meant to be a little Advent. 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 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, and encourage others to go out with us, to meet him with all the love and excitement we’ve got.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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