NewCreation

Homily for First Sunday in Advent, Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the first Sunday in Advent. Here we're beginning Year A, so that is following St. Matthew's Gospel. So from here, for the rest of the Church year, Matthew's Gospel will be our mainstay. And in order to begin our Advent as usual, the first Sunday of Advent gives us, if you like, the distant noise concerning what's coming in, so that as each Sunday comes by, our vision is gradually focused smaller and smaller, until we begin to sense exactly what it is that is happening in such a tiny scene as the birth in a manger in Bethlehem. So today we get a bit of the deep background, if you like. On the one hand, in our first reading and in our psalm, we get the notion of what is coming to Jerusalem: the day in which Jerusalem will be fulfilled in all its glory, which people will pour in to this holy place, this Temple. So the notion of a positive fulfillment. And of course that sounds tremendously visible and evident. It sounds as though huge crushes of people coming to a particular place, the Temple in Jerusalem. And the psalm is the same: "I was glad when they said unto me, let us go up to the house of the Lord." As though we're beginning a march to something known, something visible, something obvious. And part of our Advent journey will be to be disabused of that and have our eyes trained on a different sort of coming in. We get the passage from Matthew from the apocalyptic speech, the apocalyptic discourse. After Jesus has finished teaching in the Temple, he comes out and the disciples point out how beautiful they all are, and Jesus says you know they all will be thrown down. And then privately he gives them the apocalyptic discourse: the signs of the end of the age, foretelling persecutions including their own, all the things that are to happen — and of course many of which did happen during the next forty or so years after Jesus's death, leading up to the destruction of Jerusalem. And then the coming of the Son of Man, which appears to refer to what happened at the crucifixion. The lesson of the fig tree, which harks back to what Jesus had himself done to the fig tree on his way into Jerusalem at the beginning of this week. And then this week's passage. And here he changes tone slightly, because whereas things had been mysterious and difficult to understand, curiously the temperature goes down here a little bit. "For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man." So remember the picture: the earth was full of violence, and God said there was too much violence on the earth. He intended to wipe it all out and decided to save Noah. So what was going on at that time seemed normal to everybody: eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. That was what seemed normal. If it's in the midst of something that seemed completely normal that something utterly abnormal happened — Noah going into the ark, the flood coming, everybody mocking the taking of precautions about that, and then them all being swept away. But notice it's in the midst of all these normal things that the question of what our discernment of what's really going on looks like. He says then: "Two will be in the field, one will be taken and one will be left." Well, that could be a number of the fields in the Hebrew Scriptures where there were two people, the first obviously being the one into which Cain lured Abel before killing him, and one was taken and one was left. Though it's not certain that the one who was taken was taken in the way that we normally assume, because of course it was Cain who was the one who was left, and the one who was taken is the prefiguring of the founding of the kingdom. There's also famously two people who smelt like a field: the two sons of Isaac, Jacob and Esau. When Jacob's mum put the goatskin on him and made venison for his father, blind Isaac thought that he could smell the field of both his sons, and he knew Esau was of the field. So one was taken and became the father of Israel, and the other was left. "Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one will be left." I have no idea to whom that's referring. I've searched up all the references to a grinding wheel in the Hebrew Scriptures. The nearest thing I can think of — and maybe it's entirely fanciful — is to think of the two daughters who separated after the deaths of their husbands: one, Ruth, going with Naomi back to Israel, and the other going back to her household, her Moabite household. To be honest, I think that more than particular references, the whole point is this is not obvious. You need to be on the inside of something and discern something. From the outside it is going to look odd. Two in the field, one taken, one left; two grinding together, one taken, one left. What is it going to look like to be in a position to discriminate — in the good sense, to discern — what's going on wherever there are two people, wherever normal-seeming things are in fact riven through by the hints of glory or ruin? "Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." So the coming of the Son of Man, and the central message of this passage: to keep awake — grēgoreite, be Gregory, stay awake. And I think that that's the difficult key that we're being asked to do in Advent, which is… is staying awake sufficiently to be able to discriminate, to discern what is going on in the midst of our world, so that when normal-seeming things are in fact shot through with heavenly decision-making processes, and in the midst of them the Lord is coming. And it's coming as a surprise; we do not know it. So no complacency is possible. As we get in the Romans reading, they are saying to stay awake because you don't know. "The time has come to waken up." Now notice, notice this: "Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." I think it's very important that the word "your" is there, and rather surprising actually, because the next line is about somebody who is clearly not their Lord. "But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into." Now that's the image of somebody who is prepared for something negative to happen, who thinks it may happen, and has to keep awake continually because the threat of being broken into is always there. If he knows what time it's going to happen, of course there's no risk that he would have let it happen. Everything would have been perfectly guarded. The chances are that most people are not aware of the risk the whole time, and so things are not perfectly guarded. But Jesus has said just before, "You do not know on what day your Lord is coming," which suggests that it's not the negative thing that he's concerned about, but rather the people who — because we think of the Lord as on our side and think of him as our Lord and say "Lord, Lord" — because of that, we assume that it's going to be coming in a way that will be easy for us to pick up, that we will be able to detect it, that it will, as it were, be obvious from our point of view because we know what's right and what's wrong. With the suggestion that actually that's the most dangerous position to be in, because if we think we know, then we're going to be greatly deceived. We have to really become aware of the possibility that the knowing, the coming, is happening in our midst in ways we don't know, and which do not flatter our sense of belonging, our sense of what is good and bad, our sense of what is right and wrong. "Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour." So the notion — it's not only the hour that's unexpected, but actually the whole direction of the coming. It's likely to uproot our world, and if we think that we're on the right side of this, then the chances are we are going to be the equivalent of sleepy. We're not going to be sufficiently alive to what the coming in actually produces in our midst, what the shake-up in our society is about. We'll think of it as something happening for us, with us as the good guys, which is the terrible risk, rather than constantly being awake and aware of how easy it is for us to get caught up in the wrong picture of what the coming one is like. And it's after this that Jesus then teaches the three famous parables: the parable of the ten bridesmaids, the parable of the talents, and finally the parable of the judgment of the nations, which are, as it were, Matthew's teaching of discernment — precisely so that we can learn to be embedded in discriminating what is coming in, when it's coming in, how to pick up what's going on. So this, at the beginning of Advent, my sisters and brothers, I suspect is what we're being asked to enter into: discernment. All the things that are going on, where we are in relation to all of them, how much of it seems normal, how much of it seems scandalous and full of huge turbulence and uprisings and so on. The chapter immediately before this verse is precisely about those things. So the strange mixture of normal things going on while there are huge upheavals going on makes it very difficult for us to be, as it were, planted in both, and yet still alive to the one who is coming in, still prepared for all the glory that is going to come in such small form — it is going to be so strange for us to learn, and is going to take us into the kingdom. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.