There is a tendency for us to play down the second of the two comings of Jesus that I mentioned at the beginning of Mass, so as to give emphasis to his first coming, over 2000 years ago. While it gives us a warm feeling, and gives our children a lot of excitement, to prepare for the Christmas event, we must never forget that due emphasis must also be given to Christ’s return at the end of time, when he will bring world history to a close and usher in the fullness of the kingdom of heaven. We live in between those key moments in history. Note that the word “history” can be spelt as “his story”, in other words, Christ’s history. Pope St John Paul II once wrote that Jesus Christ is the fulfilment and center of all history, the world’s history and our own personal history. If our lives are centered simply on what happens to us, and what we can achieve in this world, we have missed the essential point of our life and our history. Put simply, our life and our story are determined by Christ’s life and his story. The beginning of our real life and our personal story happens not at our natural birth, but at our new birth, our supernatural birth, in other words, at our baptism. That primary sacrament, coupled with confirmation, consecrates us to God, adopts us into His family as his sons and daughters, brings forgiveness of the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and our own personal sins, restores the life of the Holy Spirit, the life of grace within us and qualifies us for everlasting life in heaven.
The consequence of our baptismal anointing, if we build on it, means that, when Christ does come at the end of time to usher in the kingdom of God, it should not be a time of mortal fear for us, as it will be for many, as Jesus says in the gospel today: “People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world”. But for us, who have kept Christ firmly at the centre of our personal history, it will be a time of rejoicing, such that we can, again in Christ’s own words “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near”. You know, and I know, brothers and sisters, that the great majority of people in our world today \, pay little or no attention to thinking about, or preparing for, the end of all things on earth, and the return of Christ in glory, the time of judgement and our eternal destiny, be it heaven or hell. Even many Christians pass their days, immersed in the things of this world, with nary a thought of the world to come, or how they should be preparing for it. Yet Jesus is most emphatic about it, again to quote his words from our gospel today: “For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth”. The Church, therefore, established the season of Advent, not so much to get us in the mood for celebrating the Christmas event, with all its angels, and shepherds, and kings. and oxen and asses, and all the rest of it. But to remind us that our real focus during this time should be on Christ’s second coming and getting ourselves ready for it, whenever it may come, so that, to quote Jesus once again, “that day does not catch us unexpectedly, like a trap”.
What most Christians fail to appreciate is that our lives can accelerate or hold back the time when Christ returns. We are, in other words, part of the process of bringing in the kingdom of God. The more we live in holiness, seeking to please God in all we do, the more we hasten the end of all things. So St Paul “urges” us in our second reading, so to live and strengthen our hearts in holiness that we may be “blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints”. St Peter, in his second letter, declares that we should be “leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting and hastening the coming of the day of God” (2 Peter 3: 11-12). We must be on guard, according to the words of Jesus in our gospel, “that our hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life”. Our prayer, our personal holiness, our lives of love of God and of others, are all means of hastening the coming of the day of the Lord.
So, we come, brothers and sisters, to this season of Advent, once again, determining how we should be living out these days of anticipation. Will we, as so many years before, forget about Christ’s second coming, and the end of all things, in order to focus in on the celebrations of the Christmas event? Or will we give sufficient concentration on the coming return of our Lord Jesus Christ? Will we allow God, in the words of our responsorial psalm to “lead the humble in what is right, and teach us his way?” Will we, in the words of our gospel, “be alert at all times, praying that we may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man”, Jesus Christ our Lord?