Sunday, November 30, 2003

 
Be Watchful, Therefore: The First Sunday of Advent

Today begins the joyful and solemn season of Advent. Solemn, because it is a pentitential season; joyful, because we celebrate the coming of Our Lord in human form.

Advent was not always the four Sundays before Easter. In the early days, it was another 40 day pentitential season, like Lent. The change in calendars reduced the number of days before Christmas, and so it became the season that we know. (Eastern Rite Catholics and Orthodox Christians still keep the old calendar, and so observe the forty days.)

As with Lent, Advent has two parts. (Didn’t know Lent had two parts? Wait until the spring to read about that.) Only the last 8 days, from Dec 17 on, concentrate on Christ’s birth at Bethlehem. The days prior to that (which may fewer or more, depending on what day of the week Christmas falls), concentrate on what is normally called The Second Coming, the ultimate revelation of Christ as King and Judge, the coming of the Messiah as predicted by the prophets of old.

And with that, most Americans’ minds click off. Why that happens is an important question.

What can we say about Jesus as Judge? Not much, beyond what He Himself has said, because we do not think God’s thoughts and we cannot judge the way He does. The Second Coming is a central part of the Creed—“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead”—but the section on the Catechism that deals directly with those words is only 5 pages long in the English edition. (14 paragraphs out of 2685.) In Scripture, too, while it plays a central part, there is little detail. Exegetes have had no end of fun with the images in the Apocalypse, but they often leave the reader feeling empty. We all know the parable of the sheep and the goats, and we should meditate on it, but the response it brings from each of is surely personal, and that brings us again to the Church Year.

The Church Year is not just an exercise. It has a point.

Imagine you know a woman, an educated, successful woman with several children. In the course of conversation, she says, “I am so grateful for my husband. I worry too much about the children, and he is able to balance things out.” If you have had any experience of the world at all, you have some intimation of what the woman means. It is a proposition that you can understand.

But you do not understand what it means to this woman.

Now let us say that you have known the family for a while. You know the nervous look the woman gets when one of her boys in particular begins to act up (which the busybodies and know-it-alls in church refer to as “acting out”). And you have seen how the husband steps in and smoothes the waters. So when you see it happen yet one more time, you may begin to have a feeling about it, a feeling of recognition, and the inkling of an intuition of what that woman means when she says she is grateful for her husband.

But you do not understand what it means to her.

You do not, and cannot, understand how her “standards” control her life, and what it means to her (Wellesley BA, NYU Law) to have a boy who probably cannot live up to the exalted hopes and expectations she has for her children. And how she feels personally responsible that he was not born with all the abilities that she might have wished, and how her impulse is to step in and fix everything, but she only makes things worse because she cannot let go. And you cannot understand how relieved she is that the boy is very comfortable with her husband (Stanford BA, Harvard MBA), who somehow can suppress his own frustrations and just accept the boy as he is and yet be strong enough to discipline him when it is necessary. That is often enough, because they have put him in schools where “he can get the personal attention he needs” but nearly all the other students are destined for Harvard and Princeton and he isn’t and feels it. And you cannot understand how she feels one Christmas when the boy, now a young man who is a shift manager at a friend’s business, which is all he will ever “be” in the way that DC means it, and who is dating a girl that he met at work, comes home happy and confident as she has never seen him and begins to shoot pool for the 2683rd time with her husband. You can never really understand what she means when she says, “I am so grateful for my husband.”

Just so does the Church Year leads us to a deeper understanding of Him, and a deeper relationship with him. As the woman goes through 25 years with her son, through Christmases and graduations, and everything else that goes on in a normal family’s life, so we go through every year again with Him. And each time around leads us to see Him, and ourselves, more clearly.

The central truth of the family above is that the husband can probably never make the wife really relax, and the wife can never really change her son much as she wants to. Indeed, the success of the family is that they see each other clearly. They do not just have relationships, they have relationships with other, specific, objective human beings.

There is a difference in this human marriage and our marriage to Christ, of course, in that the husband doesn’t focus much on the house, can be rude to waiters, and displays an obsessive desire to win when playing pool against any business associate who has come over for dinner.

Jesus doesn’t have any of that. He is in every way “like as we are, yet without sin.” He has already conformed Himself to us; we must, in gratitude, seek to conform ourselves to Him.

That’s what the Holy Father has said in his Advent sermons: now is the time to prepare for our encounter with him, an encounter with a person.

Propositions play their part. My Catechism is an old and valued friend, never very far from my reach. More importantly, Jesus taught the crowds in parables, and then pulled his disciples aside and taught them the meaning in plainer words.

But they still did not understand, did they? They had to live with Him through Calvary and beyond, and receive the Holy Spirit, and begin their lives together as the Church before they really began to understand. And none of us will really understand until we see Him face to face.

Which brings us back to the first half of Advent. Why is it that we turn our faces from this glorious and reassuring truth of the faith?

First, surely, there is simply the human reason that we do not want to be judged, or we do not think it is necessary. Or we find it frightening.

There can be theological reasons, though I confess I have always found them bewildering. There are Christians who simply remain unmoved at the thought of evangelism, or the Second Coming. (The two doctrines are intertwined.) Usually, this is because they are convinced that their calling is in this world, to solve its problems, and they find more “heavenly” concerns irrelevant. Jesus, however, did not.

But ultimately, there is a simpler reason: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Americans, and most Western Europeans, are, by any reasonable standard, as rich as any people have ever been. We therefore find ourselves sucked into the material culture around us, and the upward call of God in Christ leaves us cold.

And that is why the Church has given us the Church year. We must be reminded that every part of our lives is oriented toward that day when we will be judged, and, we pray, saved. It is a time to give us hope, and to make us draw ourselves up and rededicate ourselves, “knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer thatn when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”
Extra thoughts:

End Times Mania and the Actual End Times. Both Protestant believers and Protestant detractors from the concept of a final "Tribulation of the Church" will be surprised that the Catholic Church teaches something very similar. (See the new Catechism, sections 675-677.) The reason is easy enough to adduce: Scripture teaches it. However, the Church also takes seriously two other equally clear teachings of Christ: one is that we "shall know neither the day nor the hour" of Christ's return, and the other is that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." If one can see beyond one's own daily troubles, the Churches in many countries are today undergoing exactly the kind of trial that Scripture talks about, and we must join ourselves with them through prayer, even as we go about our daily business in relative peace, trusting in God, and keeping in mind the Final Judgment that is to come.

We cannot know the End Times, because God has not shown them to us, and we cannot ignore the End Times, because God has commanded us not to.

That's Interesting. The Apostle Paul points out (Ephesians 6:2), that the commandment to "honor thy father and mother" is the first commandment to come with a promise, "that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth." Those who have succumbed to the enticements of modern pop psychology and the license it gives you to blame and despise your parents surely can understand viscerally the truth of the promise, having lived out the opposite of the commandment.

It has been a long time since I heard a wonderful Church of God minister show how Paul lays all the troubles of the church at Corinth on the divisions that exist among them. Indeed, it is concern over those divisions that, in part, made me Catholic.

One of today's readings is quite striking, in that regard. Notice how the command to "love one another" mirrors the older commandment with a promise, to "honor thy father and mother:" "The Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you: to the end that he may establish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, with all the saints." (I Thess 3:12-13).

Surely, here, is a piece of the Cross that we must all take up. I was put in mind of a bit of verse that the Baptist pastor of my early years as a Christian was fond of quoting:

To live in love
With saints above,
Oh, that will be Glory!
To live below,
With saints we know,
Well, that's a different story.

Peace to you all during this wonderful season.
posted by A Mind That Suits 12:36 PM