NewCreation

Homily for the First Sunday in Advent Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the first Sunday of Advent. Rather than starting in by talking about the meaning of Advent, I'm going to let the texts do the work, and maybe we'll get some glimpse of what's going on in Advent by the end. So today we start with the very end of Saint Mark's apocalyptic discourse — the discourse which Jesus pronounces explaining to his disciples the meaning of the things that are to come and how to survive them. In Saint Mark, Jesus doesn't talk about this to all his disciples; he chooses four: Peter, James, John, and Andrew. So the apocalyptic discourse is given to them. It's to four quite specific people. We're going to see why that's important, because he's talking to a "you" which is quite specific, and only at the end does he say, "What I say to you I say to all." We're going to see why that's important. So the very end of his discourse, after he's explained all the forms of — if you like — chaos and catastrophe that are going to be the new normal in the wake of his performing the definitive sacrifice that brings the Temple to an end, brings the sacrificial world to an end. There'll be nothing to solve the problems of human violence. They're going to be carrying on, and it's going to be very, very difficult for them not to be distracted by all these fake sources of meaning. Very difficult for them not to be distracted from the presence of the one who is coming — the coming in of the Son of Man. So he's preparing them for living in that time, for living in our time. Just as for them, so for us, the threat of being distracted by so much violence, so much fake meaning being jostled about, giving us a sense that something great is about to happen or not. And yet all of that distracts us from having our eyes trained on the one who is coming in. So here is what Jesus says to his disciples at the very end of that discourse: "Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come." Actually, the Greek simply says "for you do not know when the time." The word is kairos — it's the understanding of time as a particular sort of eruption. In English we say "that time will come." But the word "coming" only comes rather later in the parable. We'll see why that's important, because the way Jesus describes the time — the coming in of the time — doesn't start with a coming at all. It starts with a going. "It is like a man going on a journey." So our first reaction tends to be to put that aside and say, oh well, he must be telling us… about the time that the Master is away, but actually that's not what it says. The initial description of the coming is of a certain sort of going: a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his slaves or servants in charge, each with his work. Well, this is what Jesus is about to do, and it's what he's been doing with his disciples. He's about to go, and he's been putting them in charge — particularly Peter — and no doubt he's treating James, John and Andrew in similarly important ways. He's preparing them, and one of them he's put as a doorkeeper, and he commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. And the keeper of the door is of course the one who has the key to bind and unbind. And this is also a reference to Peter. We're going to see how important this is. He's talking to these four, preparing them for the time, and the time is described as a going, with them being set up in order to be able to cope with it. And then he says to them: "Therefore keep awake." This is this wonderful one, Grēgoreite. Today is the great day for anybody called Greg or Gregory. Today is the day when your name makes it big into the Gospel. Be vigilant, stay awake. That's his instruction to these four. He's telling them about the shape of their — if you like — the tension in which they're going to live as being watchmen. The staying awake. "For you do not know when the Master will come." And here we have the word "come" — first of all was the word "going" — "you do not know when the Master will come." "In the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly." Now, of course, very beautifully Jesus sets up those four times, which are going to be very specifically the times at which each of the four to whom he is talking does not see the coming of the Master in his going. Because in the evening, Jesus hands himself over to them in the form of the Last Supper, setting up the Eucharist. At midnight, while they're all asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane — including three of these four very close to Jesus, that's Peter, James and John; Andrew gets left out — while they are asleep, suddenly Judas arrives and Jesus is handed over. It's the second handing over. Then at cockcrow, Peter hands over Jesus. Peter betrays Jesus; he denies him in the courtyard of the high priest. And at dawn, the Sanhedrin hands Jesus over to the Romans. So every single one of the moments of the Son of Man coming look in fact exactly like his going, but a particular sort of going: the sort of going that is a handing over, a going out of being, a self-giving up out of being, and the violent being taken out of being, being betrayed out of being, being dismissed as part of political convenience, going out of being. In every single one of those, the coming looks like are going. And guess what? This happens in the few days immediately after Jesus has explained this to those four, which is why it's tremendously important that he then says, "What I say to you, I say to all: keep awake." Why? Because these four get it wrong. This is the wonderful thing about the Gospel. Jesus is setting up his disciples to get it wrong, to fail to perceive the coming. Why? So that they can then bear witness to us of what it looks like to be a failure, so that little by little we may all learn to get it right through failing. This is the wonder of the Gospel: it's mercy for screw-ups, not correctness for those who want to be right. This is what's being offered here — how we are going to be able, despite our failures, to come back time and again to having our eyes trained on the coming, to be able to see one going out of being. So think of what we're celebrating in the Mass as being a calling to mind this glorious failure — Jesus actually setting up the watchman to have failed at the very first go, so that we are able to bear witness to that, or they are able to bear witness to us, and we are then able to continue to bear witness as we gradually, with great difficulty, learn to be able to see the coming of the Son of Man in his going. A rather beautiful example, which I just heard the other day, was of a wonderful 70-year-old retired nurse in the United States called, I think, Medha, who came out of retirement in order to train other nurses to deal with Covid. And of course in her training of the other nurses to deal with Covid, she herself was infected by Covid, was at high risk, and died. In her going she received the coming. She was brought into being in the act of giving herself away. This is how the Gospel is lived. This is the kind of advent, the coming, for which we are learning how to prepare ourselves all our lives long, thanks to the penitent, failed witnesses that we are learning to be. Just a chance that we may be brought into being through this. This is the mercy of our God come from on high. And that takes us to the wonderful reading from Isaiah. The first reading — one of the extraordinary things about this reading is that it gives us a sense of the heart of God. Why do we have… why do we have… there's a longing behind it: God's longing for us, expressed in the prophet's words as our longing for God. I just want to bring out something very curious about this reading. It's not a mistranslation. The prophet effectively blames God for us sinning. There's a wonderful sense of how completely the Hebrew religion was, and is, and ours should be, the religion of creation. It's the Creator who brings everything into being, who holds everything in being. Therefore, if we are screwing up, actually it's he, the Creator, who is not making it possible for us to follow his laws and enter into his ways. So the longing is: for God's sake, show us your mercy and enable us to be put right. In other words, the prophet is not asking for a blanket forgiveness from above; he's begging for the presence of that which makes forgiveness possible — if you like, the reconciliation to be alive and amongst us as humans, the fount of reconciliation to be possible. Because otherwise, you know, "we've all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth" — actually, the less hygienic version was like soiled undergarments. That's the sense of our goodness: our goodness is fake goodness, because we don't know how to reconcile, we don't know how to come together in forgiveness and actually grow, and therefore genuinely to become good. And the prophet is brave enough to blame this on God: "You've hidden your face, and that's why we transgress." This is the passion behind the coming in of Jesus — that Jesus is going to be the fountain of forgiveness, the one who actually makes it possible for creation to be fulfilled by us having our hearts made supple. That which the prophet longed for: that the creator would finally make creation fully available to us as a fount of forgiveness. So that's what is going on in Advent — this extraordinary shape of the mercy of God coming into our midst. We're being trained to observe it, to observe and to be taken on board by it, so that we become living representatives of it. That means working through a whole lot of our projections of anger, of vengeance, of punishment onto God, because our expectation is of someone who comes in to sort things out, who's going to make things sort out in a rough way, punish people. But in fact the one who comes in is going to constantly surprise by the failure to be part of vengeance. That is going to be, if you like, the most difficult thing for us to perceive. That's the thing that's most completely going to fox us — so that we receive the mercy of this time of Advent, of learning once again that the one who comes comes in gentleness and precariousness, so that we can perceive his coming in his giving himself away. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.