“Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”
In a mundane sense, this statement suggests nothing more than that time goes on, and we are closer to tomorrow than we were yesterday. But the point for St. Paul is that Christ’s coming has changed the meaning of time and history. We are closer neither because of the inexorable march of progress nor because of the inevitable progress of decay; we are closer because God has given us the time to grow in knowledge and faith and maturity. What matters is not the calculation of days between now and the end, but the way we use our time to let in more and more of the light of Christ.
It is always tempting to read Matthew 24 in a way that makes it less about Jesus and more about the world. This whole discourse follows the comments that Jesus makes in Jerusalem about the destruction of the Temple. Afterward, on the Mount of Olives, the disciples start asking him questions. What do you mean? When will all this happen? The Lord cautions them not to be like those others who always look for a sign—the perennial readers of the signs of the times. He is more concerned that they be ready for persecution and hardship.
But Christians continue ignoring this advice and worrying about the signs of the times. There is the apocalyptic version of this where we read the signs of the times in a constant attempt to calculate the end and find our precise relation to it. The other side of the coin is a progressive attempt to make sure that history moves in the right direction. These two habits tend to feed off each other. Both fail to recognize that Jesus wants us not to master history, but to remember that he is the center of it, and that we can properly prepare for the end of history only by preparing for him.
In Romans, Paul speaks about casting away the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light. That, you may recognize, is the exact language of the famous collect for this first Sunday of Advent in our missal, that beautiful collect that we brought with us from the Anglican prayer book.
But why the armor of light? Because the light is Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. Light is armor because truth is the enemy of fear—fear of the dark uncertainties of the future. Each year, we look back and prepare again for the first coming of Christ so that the light of Christmas can cast away the fear and darkness we may feel about the future, about the end of our lives and the end of this world. The light of Christ is enough. We may wish that we knew everything about the future, that that we could outline the exact courses of history; that is not given to us. But we know enough to prepare, like Noah, for what is to come. Like in the days of Noah, we are asked to build the ark, which is the Church, and live in it, though the world around sees no need for this refuge. But the rain will come, surely, in the Lord’s own time.
We are told in the meantime to “make no provision” for the flesh. By “flesh” Paul means not just “physical things,” as if we need to stop breathing or having bodies, but disordered nature, bodily life disconnected from rational order and the life of God. In other words, make no provision for sin.
Often we face the reality, when we walk out of the confessional, having confronted again some old habitual sin, that the statistics are against us: it seems very likely that we will fall again. But the grace of the sacraments is real, and relapse is not inevitable even if a betting man would say it is likely. We should make “no provision” for sin, mentally, physically, environmentally. Acknowledging the possibility of failure is not the same thing as giving in to it and making it easier, or planning as if it has already happened. We should, wherever we can, attack it ruthlessly, without mercy.
We should act this way, striving for virtue, because we do not know the day nor the hour when the Lord will return. That is one way of putting it . . . but, if we can put it bluntly, we do know the day and the hour, and it is now. Because there is that third Advent, the one that happens every day on the altars of the Catholic Church, when the Lord visits us again in great humility under the veiled appearance of bread and wine.
What will you say to Jesus, when you meet him, at the Last Day? In my childhood evangelical Protestantism, it was common to ask, “If you died tonight, do you know that you would go to heaven?” Or, as my sixth-grade Baptist math teacher used to say, do you know that you know that you know that if you died tonight, you’d go to heaven?
With respect to my Protestant friends, this kind of certainty is exactly the kind of thing that the Lord warns us against in Matthew 24. Certainty isn’t the goal. Certainty is a distraction. The goal is Jesus.
But a question about confronting your imminent demise is actually very traditional. And the Catholic answer, amusingly enough, is that what we need here is not certain knowledge, as if it were some kind of mathematical proof, but faith. That faith is strengthened by knowledge, of course, but even more by practice. We gain confidence and hope that we can meet the Lord face to face by practicing that meeting as often as we can in this life. That is central both to Advent and to the celebration of the Eucharist. We have to learn to say “I love you” and mean it, because the only armor we wear is the light of God’s love itself, stronger and yet more supple than any force this world can muster.