Today’s readings are giving us a wake-up call. As St. Paul says in the second reading: “it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep”. But there is more at stake than just being awake. We could be awake and yet be only half alive, because we have no awareness, no understanding, no vision as to what lies ahead. It may take a shock or at least a jolt of some kind to wake us up.
Today we begin the Church season of Advent, a season that calls us to be awake, a season that invites us to assess our relationship with our Lord Jesus as we prepare for his 1st coming at Christmas. Advent is a time where we are called to be patient, to be willing to allow God’s presence in our daily lives and to awake every morning with gladness and hope.
I visited with a gentleman who was suffering with an illness that did not allow him to leave his small apartment. He was telling me that he had nothing to live for, nothing that he could do daily to occupy his time. He spent hours looking back and forgetting what lies ahead for him, in this life and the next. He was growing impatient with God because he was still on this earth thinking that he had no purpose .
Instead of thanking God for another day, he regretted even waking up to face another day. After some discussion he finally realized that he had his wife still with him after many years of marriage. He did have that to look forward to and to more years with the one he loves. He also realized that all this is in God’s hands and that he needs to make the best of what he has been dealt with by turning to Jesus for strength and patience.
Each day summons us to awake from sleep. Sometimes we can’t wait for the morning to come. Remember when we were kids, and maybe for us now as adults. It is like waiting for Christmas morning and the opening of presents under the tree. What fun!!! We wake up in joyful anticipation. We feel good to be alive. We are thankful to God for the gift of another day. It is another day to live our lives, to realize our dreams, to fix that which needs to be fixed, to finish that which needs to be finished. This is a good one for me. I start a lot of things and finish only a few.
Other times we are apathetic about waking up. We greet the new day with no enthusiasm. Life may be empty for us, like the gentleman I spoke about. Perhaps we are unemployed and tired of rejection of job application after job application. Perhaps we are sick and are limited to what we can do. And some of us have known days, hopefully not to many, when we dread the coming of morning. We wake up fearfully, and get up reluctantly. Life is a burden for us and perhaps we are in our older years or sick or alone.
How we greet each morning is very important for us. No one has a perfect life. All of us have and will face life’s difficulties. It is what we make of them that matters. If we greet the day with joy and thankfulness, we will bring energy and enthusiasm to our lives. Even our daily tasks will become challenges and not things that bring us down.
There is this woman who is confined to her bed, paralyzed from the waist down and suffering from Palsy. The only thing she wanted was to be active in her parish. Well, that posed a problem. What could she do lying in her bed? She could not make mass.
She could not make any meetings, she could not drive to another parishioners house to make things for the bazaar. She could not make the prayer group meetings. One thing she became very good at was praying. That was it. She is now on the prayer chain praying for those who need prayers of healing, prayers for hope. She is awake!
If things in our lives are beyond our control, then we should try to change the way we think about it. Advent brings a spiritual wake-up call for us, and has an awakening power. We only live half-way when we are not spiritually awake. When we live this way, we do not see, we do not hear. Our minds become narrow and closed. Our hearts become hardened. To be awake spiritually means that we are open and receptive to hear God speaking to us, giving us hope.
To be awake means to watch. To watch means to be alert, to be concerned, to be active, to be interested, to care, not only for others but for our spiritual needs. Jesus urges us to stay awake, to be on our guard, to be on the watch. We have nothing to fear and everything to gain from answering Advents wake-up call.
The gospel reading today references the third coming of Jesus. Jesus refers to the time before the flood when, except for Noah, people were basically unaware. They went about living their ordinary lives (eating and drinking and making merry) and to their surprise, the flood came and carried them away.
Jesus says, that is the way it will be in the end times. Those who are unaware, those who are asleep, will be carried away and since we do not know the time the Lord will come, we are to stay awake!
I mentioned the third coming of Jesus. The first was his birth we celebrate at Christmas. The second coming is His continued advent in our lives as we receive Jesus more deeply in our hearts, and finally to the ultimate coming in glory as the “Son of Man” at the end of the world.
In the early church, Christians were awaiting the second coming of Jesus as they knew it to be, which they thought was imminent. At any rate, it was a sense of urgency. A real sense to get with the program. As St. Paul put it; “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ”. He was saying to forget all that is of human weakness and turn to Jesus for safe haven, to Jesus for strength and patience.
Yes, this weekend we start the season of Advent. The Lord is telling us to remain awake so that his coming which will come at an unexpected moment will not take us by surprise. It takes a lot of effort to remain awake when we are actually feeling sleepy.
Being awake spiritually is no different. Remaining awake means being constantly aware of God’s presence, remaining attentive to what he wants us to do and doing it, refraining from that which displeases him, even when our natural inclination would lead us to do it.
This is the first Sunday of a new liturgical year. Another year has come and gone. Time is passing. It is not so different for us now as it was then for the early church. Christ’s third coming is imminent. Life is short, so we need to get on with our work.
We must seize the day. We shall pass through this world but once. Therefore, any good that we can do, to any human being, let us do it now, let us not put it off for another day or neglect it; for we shall not pass this way again. This is our shock, our jolt, this is our wake-up call.