Dec. 3: First Sunday of Advent

The Messiah’s return

Is 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7; Ps 80:2-3, 15-16, 18-19 ;1 Cor 1:3-9; Mk 13:33-37

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” so goes the popular holiday tune. It has been looking like Christmas for a while now. American secular and commercial culture has been leading the way with Christmas creep. At one time, the holiday season began with Thanksgiving, but now it begins several weeks earlier.

With Advent beginning today, it appears that the church is finally getting in step with the holiday season, but today’s readings direct our attention to the Messiah’s return, not his birth.

The reading from Isaiah leads us to appropriate the prophet’s prayer as we wait for that return: “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down” (Is 64:1). Paul then reminds us that we have “every spiritual gift as we wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:7). We should be ready. In the Gospel, Jesus calls us to be “watchful and alert” (Mk 13:33), since we do not know the time of the Lord’s second coming.

A popular view of the Messiah’s return imagines it as a time of judgment and condemnation — not as something to look forward to with eager anticipation. A medieval poet called it “dies irae,” “a day of wrath.”

The Messiah’s return, however, will be a time of triumph and joy because he will come to complete his work on earth, destroying the power of sin and death once and for all, and transforming the world into a place of justice, peace and love.

Advent affirms that there is a goal to human history. We are waiting for the Messiah’s return, when God’s love and power will finally end human suffering, injustice, war, ignorance and hatred. The final victory ends the power of death. It will no longer be able to hold captive anyone who believes in the Messiah whom God has sent. This new world — this new age — is worth waiting for.

Waiting for the return of the Messiah is not a passive waiting. Faith in the Messiah’s victory over every power of evil does not lead believers to do nothing as they look to the heavens for the Messiah’s appearance. Christian hope is active.

Those who wait for the Messiah’s return devote themselves to works that serve to hasten the day of his victory over every evil power. Whatever is done to make this world a better place will never be done in vain or be without value.

When the Messiah returns, he will take our feeble efforts, join them to his own, and present a new, transformed world to God.

Today’s Scriptures orient Christian faith to the future. Christians look forward. During the Eucharist, we remember Christ’s death and resurrection as he asked: “Do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19). But we also look for Christ to come again.

While we wait for the Messiah’s return, we keep our eyes focused on this world and on the needs of our brothers and sisters. If we do so, we will show ourselves worthy of a place in the world to come.

Advent is not the church’s countdown to Christmas. The focus of this liturgical time is on the return of the Messiah and the new world and new age that he will inaugurate. It will be the world as God always intended it to be. It will be a world without sin and death. More than this, we cannot say because “no ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait” (Is 64:4). For this we give thanks.