With the start of Advent, Christians recall the most offensive event in human history. We are forced to confront the monstrous fact that as humans we are so broken, hate-filled and dysfunctional that in order to save us from destruction, the timeless, all-powerful creator of the universe had to enter into time and become powerless. In light of such a fact, we cannot but dispel any notion of self-sufficiency, any thoughts of our being capable of saving ourselves.
But even while the Advent story reminds us that Christ has done all of the heavy lifting, it also instructs Christians that we still have a responsibility to prepare ourselves for Christ’s salvific work in us. To this point, St. Paul exhorts us in today’s second reading “to throw off the works of darkness” and “put on the armor of light,” while making “no provision for the desires of the flesh.” Similarly, in today’s Gospel, Christ exhorts his disciples to always be vigilant and prepared since “at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” He likens those who will be unprepared for his second coming to those people who rather than preparing for the great flood in the time of Noah were instead “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”
The stern words of warning we find in these readings should lead us to ponder an important question: How should we as Christians relate ourselves to the present things of this world if we wish to be prepared for Christ’s coming?
The answer to this question, I think, lies in a rejection of its central premise. In light of the Incarnation and the extraordinary events that transpired following the first Advent in first-century Palestine, literally everything has changed. There are no longer merely present or merely earthly things. There are, instead, two kinds of eternal things. There are things—goods, actions, desires, relationships—that help to prepare us for Christ’s coming and open our hearts for reception of God’s grace and other things, what Paul refers to as “the works of darkness,” that do the reverse.
When, for example, we stand up for the unborn, the defenseless, the oppressed, we do not merely make our present society more just. More than this, by disposing ourselves to action in the service of love, we clear a landing space, in both ourselves and the society around us, for God’s salvific grace. When we instead indulge in the works of darkness—when we refuse to stand up for the defenseless, the oppressed and the outcast—precisely the opposite occurs. We put an obstacle in the way of divine grace.
As we approach this Advent season, let us take time to reflect honestly on our lives, that we might properly distinguish between those things that have been preparing us for Christ’s coming into our hearts and those things that have not. So long as we honestly and courageously prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming, we may rest assured that he will do the rest—in fact, he has done it already.
