Homily for Sunday 1 of Advent, Year C

Homily for Sunday 1 of Advent, Year C Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the First Sunday of Advent in Year C. So we're beginning this year in which we'll be following Luke's Gospel, having done Mark's last year. And in today's passage we actually move on from Mark's apocalyptic speech, which is where we ended the Sunday before Christ the King. We had Jesus's speech outside the Temple talking about the things that were to come. And today we start Advent with Luke's version, or part of Luke's version, of the same speech. This is Jesus speaking to his disciples outside the Temple. And immediately some of the things become different. If you remember in Mark's Gospel, the going and the coming were the same thing. The going of the Son of Man and the coming of the Son of Man were the same thing, were ways of referring to the same thing. It's part of the density of Mark's Gospel. Luke is much more interested, as we'll see over the course of this next year, in the question of time — the intermediate time in which we live. In fact, Luke's treatment of time is very delicate and subtle throughout his Gospel. But in particular, he's obviously writing for Christians at a slightly later period than Mark, and he's interested in explaining things to a more Gentile population with some knowledge but not necessarily complete knowledge of how Jewish things work. But one of the things that he's very keen to bring out — one of the things he downplays, or in fact removes, in his Gospel time and time again — is any notion of vengeance. It's one of the extraordinary things that wherever you might expect vengeance, Luke takes it out. So here we have a speech: "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among the nations," which in a more Semitic Gospel — and obviously Luke has a great deal of knowledge of the texts of the Hebrew Scriptures in their Greek version immediately behind him; I suspect he's writing for a Gentile audience — but where those kinds of signs of distress and so on would be attributed to God, here they're not. He's talking as though all that is over. If there were a day of vengeance, it's already passed with Jesus's death, which was actually presented in his Gospel, or will be presented in his Gospel, as the moment of the new creation, when Jesus breathes out after the sun has gone down. The sun has gone down, there is complete darkness at noon, and Jesus breathes out the Spirit — which is going back therefore outside creation for the whole of creation to start again. So Luke does not use the threatening language of the prophets; he uses the images of the prophets but without the threatening language, because he knows that there is no vengeance in God. What he refers to here as "people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”, he's talking about what we would now call intermediary cosmic forces — the notion of angels, good angels and bad angels, toughing it out in heaven. But we would talk more about, I guess, shifts in human interaction that have worldwide consequences: how our attitudes towards each other, towards families, towards competition, and so on, shifts over time. The in-between is constantly shifting, and it produces enormous alterations in how we live together. That kind of thing, of course, was noticed at that time as well, but now it's just playing out on a more global scale. But he takes out the divine causality of these things. In fact, it's quite important that it not be divine causality. The divine causality has already come in terms of Jesus going to his death. So Jesus here is telling his disciples what it's going to be like after he's gone to his death, after he's actually made the great change, brought to an end any possible notion of vengeance, fulfilled everything. From that point onwards there is going to be a new time that's going to be opened up, and it's going to be a difficult time in which everything is going to be shaken up, because what he has done will start to become visible. He will have made visible the innocence of the victim, which is the beginning of the undoing of all our systems of fooling ourselves about how good we are by blaming other people. It's going to become visible that that's what we're doing. We will know that it's wrong, and that actually loosens up all our systems of belonging, makes it more difficult. And that in itself makes us more tense and more inclined to more violent forms of belonging, which don't last for so long because we know they're fake, we know they're wrong, and so on. This constant human violence, because we can't accept what the Son of Man has done for us. So Luke is very keen on talking about this intermediate time, which is the one in which we're still living, and which is therefore what the first Sunday of Advent is about. It's saying: this is the time you are living in. And of course any of us who follow the news — "there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and all the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken." Well, it almost doesn't sound as though it was written 2,000 years ago, apart from the phrase about the powers of the heavens being shaken, which is a sign of an old cosmology. Anyone looking around the world has a good deal of those in mind. It says, "then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory." Now that was the same as we had it in Mark — he had the same quote from the prophet Daniel — but Luke understands something slightly different. Mark understands, of course, the moment of the crucifixion, which is when the Son of Man comes in great glory with clouds and standing clouds of incense, because the definitive sacrifice has happened. But here Luke is talking about a long-term process of the visibilization of something — something becoming more and more visible over time. In fact, the innocence of the victim, the crucified one, the presence of the forgiving crucified one as being the dynamic of history, will become more and more visible. "When all these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads." In other words, because you know about this, you will have been the beneficiaries of this. You will have understood what's going on even while all the chaos is at work, even while all the sense of disturbance and everything becoming unfamiliar and everything changing and us losing our way and it becoming very difficult to work out what's going on — you will have been the beneficiaries of this, because you will have learned from the crucified and risen one where good is, where bad is, how to receive love, how to grow in the midst of all this. Then it says: "So when you see these things happening, stand up." In other words, it's going to become possible to say, "Yeah, okay, time to find my place in what's coming in. I'm able to see that I can be part of this. I'm going to be part of this." Then, in Luke's Gospel, we have the parable of the fig tree, which we already had in Mark, so the Church asks us to jump it today. And we come on to the next chunk: "Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life." Dissipation might actually just mean a hangover — the word can be both — with hangover and hard drink and the worries of this life. Worries are usually associated with money and dealing with family issues. "And that day catch you unexpectedly." So he's saying: yes, the coming of the Son of Man, this constant process of visibilization, which is coming everywhere — to all societies, all tribes, all peoples, all nations — this is not just a Church thing. This is something that's going to happen all over the world in every tribe and people, nation and tongue. And, for everyone who's caught up in it, it will seem like a trap, because they will be in something they assume to be good and suddenly their world will be turned upside down, because they will discover the forgiving victim, they will discover the one who has been telling the real story all along — and it wasn't them — and they will have to discover that they need to be forgiven, which is of course the best thing that could possibly happen to them. But if they're busy fighting against it, they're not going to get it. He says that it will catch you unexpectedly like a trap. It's interesting here that Luke doesn't use the phrase — the phrase which appears both in Mark's Gospel and in the book of Revelation about coming like a thief in the night. And there, I think, a good reason why he uses the simpler word "a trap," because a gentile public couldn't be expected to know the sort of trap that was being sprung in that very dense image of “the Son of Man will come upon you like a thief in the night.”, because the thief in the night, of course, burrows through a hole in the house — that's simple enough, a house made of rather poor mud brick; we understand that, that's not difficult to understand. What we don't remember as Gentiles is that Exodus 22 has specific instructions about this. "If a thief burrows through your house into the house in the night, and you catch him in the breach during the night, and kill him, then there’s no guilt upon you." It's not murder. You've done something good; you've been protecting your house. “But if he comes in the daylight and you kill him, then your blood is on you”, then it's murder, because you really ought to have been taking better care of your house than to let him come in. So when Jesus referred to himself as a thief in the night, he's actually talking — this is one of the strange things — he's talking about his forthcoming death, and the fact that there's going to be no blood guilt upon the people who killed him. Hence it being rather important that the sun goes down at the time he actually dies. It's not by sunlight. But, in fact, that's the way he takes hold of the house. They can't perceive that, but that's the way he takes hold of the house. They killed him. There is no guilt on them for that, because of the book of Exodus. But he has come in. They were looking to protect the house in completely different ways, and have completely missed how, by going to his death, he has in fact taken over the house of Israel, become the presence in the Temple, the presence of God, and he's going to start to build the temple without hands. So that was part of the imagery that's in the notion of the thief in the night. But Luke leaves that out and just talks about it coming like a trap — meaning, because obviously what I'm describing was a trap in which the trappers are trapped, as it were, but innocently. It's quite a complicated image, if you like, of redemption. But he says: "Watch out lest he come upon you like a trap," because yes, the chances are we will be thinking of being good somewhere and not be aware of how we will have been hiding away, not paying attention to, not wanting to listen to the Son of Man as he comes into our midst. And then suddenly we'll be caught — oh my God, I've been on the wrong side of history, I've been on the wrong side, I've been doing the wrong thing, thinking myself good, I have been caught up in something terrible. The light hasn't been able to get through. He says: "Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place and to stand before the Son of Man." Again the notion of standing. It's the notion that by living without drunkenness, dissipation, all these things, and worry, we keep our intelligence, our antennae out constantly, being alert to see where the Lord is coming in, what really is of the Spirit, so that we are not caught but gradually, as he comes close, we are able to stand. Are you the ones who have reached out to the poor, the marginalized, so you can stand? But notice with Luke: no vengeance, no threats, no good this way, bad that way. It's much more a vision of one coming in wanting everybody to be seen and to be found. This is the Luke undoing-vengeance picture of the merciful coming of the one, even if it's in the midst of terrible things. But these are terrible things that are at the human level. This is not to do with God being some sort of punisher. Anyhow, we will explore this more in the weeks and months to come. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.