“Watch therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.”
We’re now in Advent—that time of waiting and preparing before Christmas. We watch and wait with the very pregnant Virgin Mary as she anticipates the birth of her miraculous son. But Advent is not just about waiting for the baby Jesus. It is also about waiting and looking for the second coming of Christ. The Day of the Lord. Judgment Day. That’s the return of the Master that Jesus refers to in Mark 13. It’s all of those kinds of things that are a little less pleasant.
A lot of the messages that we get from Scripture and Tradition—from the songs and prayers of Advent—focus on this theme of being ready, on not letting the day sneak up and catch us.
I’m sure that not a few people do feel that way about Christmas, especially when it comes to Christmas shopping. But there are all sorts of other ways that things creep up on us in this life. Exams and the end of term for those in school. The end of a pleasant vacation. And how many of us feel sometimes, in our forties or fifties or beyond, that our youth just ended, and where did all that time go?
Those are things we know about. We have calendars. Maybe you’ve seen this new trend in calendars that tries to prevent procrastination by showing you the total number of weeks you are likely to live. We plan, and time still creeps up on us.
A few verses before today’s selection in Mark, Jesus gives some signs of the end. In other words, you’ll get some alerts. Maybe you’ll hit snooze, but the warnings will still be there. In fact, we often fluctuate, as believers, between a kind of panic about the end and an apathy about it. However apocalyptic the world may feel at times, the signs—wars, rumors of war—are ever present, and so, as then-cardinal Ratzinger points out in his book Eschatology, it is simply the case historically that “every generation could feel addressed by these signs and apply them to their own age.”
But this doesn’t mean that we should sit back and relax. Ratzinger continues: “The signs, at any rate . . . do not permit a dating of the End. They do indeed relate the End to history—but by compelling every age to practice watchfulness.”
In other words, no one knows exactly how things will go in the future, and the end cannot be calculated by some mystical formula of Scripture and private revelation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t prepare.
In fact, waiting for a baby—like what Mary is doing at this point in our yearly walk through the life of Jesus—is a good example. Not perfect, mind you, because in this age, we do get due dates! But staying alert doesn’t mean that you never relax or stop to breathe or sleep. That’s not a good strategy at all. You don’t know when the baby will come, so you get as much sleep as you can. You rest up. You put everything in order. You make plans for who will do what, whom you will call. You make sure a bag is ready to go. You make sure the car has gas. You try not to think too hard about whether the baby will come during a snow emergency.
This past spring, when we were in what clerics sometimes call “assignment season,” I was waiting anxiously to hear what the bishop was going to do with me. I knew I was likely to move; I even knew some of the places where I might be moved. But I really had no clue when I would get the call—or even whether it would be a call, or an email, or a letter. The point is that knowing that something is coming doesn’t magically make us ready for it. We still have to step up and do the work. Waiting isn’t just passive.
And, to move into more definite spiritual territory, there is a kind of waiting and anticipation built into every Mass. We know that Jesus is coming. We know that he will be waiting for us under the appearance of bread and wine. But whether we are ready to meet him, ready to see him and accept him, is really up to us. Showing up isn’t enough. We have to prepare our hearts and our minds and our bodies. In one sense, we are all like the Virgin Mary in this season, because we are all asked to prepare to receive Jesus not just in history, but in ourselves. We are asked to hold him in our hearts and eventually share him with those around us.
This waiting and preparation that we do now is itself preparation for the life to come. Advent reminds us over and over again that if we can prepare to receive the baby Jesus at Christmas, we will be better prepared to see Jesus when he comes again in glory and judgment. One of the better compositions of the twentieth century’s liturgical reforms is the first Preface for Advent, perfected (dare I say) in our missal’s translation: “Thou didst send thy beloved Son to redeem us from sin and death, and to make us heirs in him of everlasting life; that when he shall come again in power and great glory to judge the world, we may without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing.” As we saw recently with the parable of the talents and the “valiant woman” of Proverbs: preparing for the small things is important in preparing for the big things.
It is so very easy to say to yourself: this doesn’t matter. What really matters is (insert super-important thing). Paying the mortgage. Not failing the class. Not committing murder. Fixing the systemic problems of American politics.
Recently, a group of protesters angrily interrupted the live national radio broadcast of Evensong in an English cathedral because the diocese had not fully boycotted fossil fuels. The reason that this way of thinking is so tempting—and let’s be clear that this isn’t just a problem of the woke fringes; it’s a problem for you and me—is because it is partly correct. Yes, not killing someone is more important than whether or not you put out a tablecloth and speak respectfully to one another at dinner. Yes, passing good and just laws is probably more important than whether you can listen to a nice motet on the radio. But life, reality, does not allow us to just skip straight to the parts that we like. Our culture tries really hard—with contraception, abortion, and the constant redefinition of nature—to fit what we feel at the moment. But it doesn’t work, because if you throw out all the little things, you don’t get the big things, either: life, love, joy, fellowship, the peace that passes understanding.
“And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.” Wait patiently, but actively, for the Lord has promised that he will “sustain us to the end” as we wait “for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:7-8).