First Sunday of Advent - November 30, 2003

            Christmas comes and goes so fast these days, often lost in a world wind of shopping, cooking, preparing for family visits, and so on.  Thank God for Advent, which began yesterday evening and even now as we are at this Holy Mass.  Thank God for Advent, if we observe this season as we ought.  And this is difficult when we have so much we feel like we have to get done before Christmas.  But try we must, lest we miss something of immense importance.

            And the Season of Advent is about something of supreme importance.  To miss it is to miss, in a sense, the whole purpose for our existing.  And it is this:  Advent is the time of waiting and preparing for culmination of all human existence.  Advent is the end-of-the-line of the train we call life.  Advent is the final curtain on world history.

            What do I mean by this?  Well, we Christians have always stubbornly defined and understood our world not merely by observing it and testing hypotheses about it, like a scientist would, but by seeing this world, this life, through the lens of what we believe it is made for.  If you read the ancient Hebrew writings in the Old Testament and if you take even a cursory look at the greatest of the ancient philosophers -- especially Plato and Aristotle -- and follow the thoughts of these great sages and thinkers all the way up through history in the Catholic tradition, culminating with Augustine and even more so with Thomas Aquinas, you will notice something very peculiar, something the modern world began with by denying (though now just beginning to take another look), something taken for granted all through human history until the dawn of the scientific age.  And what is this now almost silent thought?  What is this strange idea that used to haunt the human race and is beginning to do so yet again, now through the work of the scientists themselves? 

            It is this:  that there is a certain unintelligibility about our world, that this universe is not in itself self-explanatory, that the created order cannot be fully comprehended, not only because we don’t have all the facts about it, but also because it seems to be moving toward something.  It seems, to the greatest philosophers, thinkers, and sages, to be incomplete, yet aiming at completion.  It seems that it will only be really explained when there is a kind of culmination, a fulfillment, a goal reached.  We Christians call this the Second Coming of Christ.

            And what we mean by this is that the universe, our world, and every human soul who has ever lived and will ever live, including you and me, will only truly know and understand this life and ourselves when we see face to face the Maker and Giver of all Life.  God is the source and end of what we call creation.  And one day that will be made manifest to the whole of humanity.  That’s what Advent is mainly about -- preparing to face and enjoy that Answer (God Himself) to the riddle of life, of human existence.

            It’s all explained in mysterious fashion already in Jesus Christ, this God who made the worlds, who now at Christmas time has come to dwell among us as a man.  But in the little manger in Bethlehem God came as if in disguise, His glory and divinity hidden by human flesh, even as that human flesh was the very means of His being with us.  The whole universe, and every human life, in all of history is moving toward the final unlocking of that secret, when Christ, God come in the flesh, returns at the end of time as the one in whom, by whom and through whom all things were made, and to whom we all must give account of how we have lived this life God gave us.

            C. S. Lewis describes this moment of truth better than anything outside the Scriptures that I have ever read:  He comments on the fact that God first came in a kind of disguise, incognito.  Why does He not land in force and invade our world?  Why does God not show Himself as He really is.  “Is it that He is not strong enough?  Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when.  But we can guess why He is delaying.  He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.... But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does.  When that happens, it is the end of the world.  When the author walks on to the stage the play is over.  God is going to invade, all right:  but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else -- something it never entered your head to conceive -- comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?  For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.  It will be too late then to choose your side.  There is no use saying you choose to like down when it has become impossible to stand up.  That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not” (from Mere Christianity).

            Advent is about the culmination of all things; it is about the end of the drama we know as history.  Advent is the time we remind ourselves that all natural things have an end, including our own lives in this world, including the very universe in which we live.  Both, the universe itself and us, we were made for something else, for Someone else.  God.  He is the end of the story.  Advent is our time, a wonderful opportunity, to concentrate in a special way on preparing for that day, when we will stand before our God who made us for Himself.   Advent, this holy season,  is ours for making that day the beginning of an eternity of joy.