IT MATTERS
Author: Fr. Michael Byron November 27, 2021
We live in
dangerous times. We live in dangerous
times. I’m not talking about new
variants of COVID, or political instability, or racial unrest, or random acts
of violence and terror, or climate change. That’s all true too, but that’s not the danger of which our scriptures speak today on this First Sunday of Advent.
Particularly
in the Gospel of Luke, I think many of us can relate to that vague sense of
bewilderment that he describes – although the physical causes of it are
different. Jesus speaks here of
astrological omens in the sun and the moon and the stars, and unexplained
violent movements of the tides of the ocean. We aren’t dealing with those things, at least not at the moment, but we
are dealing with all of those other things that I just mentioned. And in both cases there can be a sense of
troubling, and sometimes very dark
mystery that causes people – sometimes like me – to ask, “What in the
world is going on here?” Where is this all headed? Is this the end of the world as we know
it? Jesus speaks of it as fear or
anxiety over the future. What about the
economy? What about Russia? What about
China? What about this brand new Omicron
variant of the virus? We’ve got plenty
to be concerned about.
But again,
none of it is the danger of which the gospel speaks today. According to Jesus, the great danger is lethargy – the risk
that we will let down our guard in expecting his second coming in victory. I guess we could call it disinterest by
despair.
In the days,
months, and first years after Jesus’s ascension in to heaven, it was the common
belief among Christians that he might very well come back to Earth today or tomorrow, literally. And people organized their lives on that
belief. But then the years turned into
decades, and by the time Luke’s gospel was written down it had been about a
half century since the events of Easter and Ascension. Believers weren’t so much losing hope as they
were losing interest; losing a sense of urgency; a sense that it really
mattered how they behaved from day to day because of their allegiance to
Jesus. They were drifting back to
business as usual. And that is exactly
the reason for what comes next in today’s gospel reading. Jesus tells them of the truly dangerous time
in which they live:
“Beware
that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the
anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap….”
The true
danger is for us to begin to imagine that our conduct doesn’t really matter
anyway because he won’t be back for quite a while. The danger is indifference.
So just
imagine how much greater is the danger in our own time, when we Christian believers have now been waiting for his return for
about 2000 years. Are there really any
among us who expect his appearance in the next half hour or so? Do we make any of our decisions on that
possibility? The gospel’s message, and the message of this Advent time is, we should be doing exactly that.
We haven’t
any idea of the day or the hour of our Lord’s return. In fact, Jesus himself tells us elsewhere
that even he didn’t know that time while he walked among us on
earth. But this teaching is not intended
merely to be a scare tactic or a threat, as if God is out to get us. Rather, it is an urgent plea for us to
conform our lives, here and now, to the example that Jesus showed us. It is to say, “It matters!” The only ones among us who need to be at risk
of the trap are the ones who convince themselves otherwise.
For centuries
– right up to the time of my own childhood – the Church got a rich reward for
threatening people with hell and damnation for making moral mistakes and for
committing sins. That was wrong. The Church has never been the judge of
that. Only God is.
But now we
live in a suddenly very different time, with the threats from the pulpit
largely removed, but being replaced by a sense that people are now broadly
excused from taking Jesus’s teaching and life witness seriously in the way that
we make decisions.
That, THAT,
is why we live in a dangerous time. The
temptation is indifference.
“Do
not let your hearts become drowsy,” he tells us.
But there’s
more to Jesus’s words today than simply keeping us from going astray or winding
up in hell. Embedded in these same scriptures is also a promise, an
assurance, a hope. He reminds us that
even in the face of all the fear and all the things that so easily perplex us,
he is still in control of things, and after the fear comes reward for
all who remain faithful to him:
“You
will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud and great glory…..
so stand
erect and raise your heads, because your redemption is at hand.”
We are not invited to be terrified of God in this
life. We are merely required to take God
seriously, by attending well to the Savior who He sent to us. Advent is a time to do exactly that – to
remember that this world and our lives, precious as they now are, are not meant
to end here. After all the dangerous
times will be another way of our existence, which neither time nor danger can
threaten. It is ours to decide whether
or not to embrace that. It matters.
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