The First Sunday of Advent, Year B, 2011

Mark 13:24-37

The Rev. Ronald N. Johnson

Jesus said, “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.”

For over two thousand years, the Church has struggled with this passage and others in the New Testament like it, and in truth we have no idea what to do with this type of biblical literature.  It is strange stuff – really strange, and for that reason, if for no other, reading it is a good way to begin the new Church year and the season of Advent.  You see, the Church is just never really sure what to do with Advent, either.  There is a tension in Advent tugging us in different directions.  You see this struggle in the lessons, particularly in the gospel readings from week to week.  For the First Sunday in Advent, we always have an apocalyptic reading from one of the gospels.  Apocalyptic literature is the strange stuff about the end of the world, a heralding of doom and gloom which the early Church expected to pre-stage the Lord’s Second Coming.  The expectation of a second coming of Jesus was very strong in the earliest days of the Church and it is still official Church doctrine.  But, unless you are of the sort that thinks that the return of Jesus is only a matter of days away, this type of literature doesn’t seem especially meaningful.  What it does to Advent is give it a penitential shape, making it a season of the mea culpa.  It encourages us to practice self-examination and acknowledge our failures to a forgiving God.  In other words, there is an aspect of Advent that is a mini Lent.  That is why most parishes use their purple hangings and drop the Gloria and Alleluia’s during Advent.  You should know that, increasingly, parishes are using blue as the Advent color.  The reason is to try to move away from the heavily penitential overtone.  Whether this is good or bad, I leave to you.  The bottom line is that Advent is a different kind of season.

The Church tries to step away from the penitential overtone as Advent moves on from week to week, remaking Advent into a season of increasingly joyful anticipation of the celebration of the birth of Jesus.  A favorite Advent hymns is “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”  Emmanuel means “God is with us,” and acknowledges the presence of God in the Messiah.  That is very good news and a cause for joy.  As we move through the Advent season, the anticipation of Christmas draws us deeper into the season’s joy because we know that the Messiah ransoms us from sin and death, making us a new people, a redeemed people and there can be no better news.

So we have these two polls: on the one hand anxiety about being caught unprepared to meet Jesus and, on the other hand, excitement, because the season draws us into the presence of Jesus.  We call Advent the season of waiting. The word “advent” comes from the Latin word that means “coming.”  In this sense, Advent is the season of the Lord drawing near.

On a personal level, I think that Advent, like Lent, is a very good season for self-examination and spiritual preparation.  In the Gospel today, Jesus said to watch, prepare and make ready. The reality is that we do not know when the time will come and how it will come.  We do not know how and when we will meet Jesus, but we do know that he will come and that we must stand before him and give him a reckoning of how we have lived our lives.  So we wait, and while we wait we prepare, and we strive, as Advent encourages us to do, to realize that this season can help us to grow daily in faith and in hope in our redemption, through Christ our Lord. Amen.