Advent's Shaking Nature

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Matthew 24:36-44

“There is perhaps nothing we modern people need more than to be genuinely shaken up.”

That was written by a Jesuit priest named Alfred Delp, who was looking out at a world that was shaken to its core. The whole world was at war, and the foundations of a noble and just Germany, which Father Delp called home, lay in ashes because of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi war machine.

Father Delp, along with countless other theologians, wrestled with God’s presence – or seemingly lack thereof – amid the crisis of Nazism. Why would God allow this to happen, and what did it say about human nature and the power of evil?

Alfred Delp believed the world had slowly become immune to the atrocities carried out by the Third Reich. Clearly, individuals and whole societies had the tendency to minimize the seriousness of a situation in order to sustain a false sense of security and normalcy.

We will go to great lengths to deceive ourselves to keep the status quo. The world was being shaken from its slumber and called to cast away the works of darkness in this mortal life.

In the latter part of 1944, Father Delp began writing about the crisis he saw in the world and what God might be up to. He found many ominous and apocalyptic similarities to his situation and the great themes of Advent.

For you see, Advent is about ultimate things. It is about life and death and the end of the age. It is about where this world is going and the judgment that will befall it. It is about Christ and his promise to one day return.

In one of his reflections Father Delp wrote:

Here is the message of Advent: faced with him who is the Last, the world will begin to shake. Only when we do not cling to false securities will our eyes be able to see this Last One and get to the bottom of things. Only then will we be able to guard our life from the frights and terrors into which God the Lord has let the world sink to teach us, so that we may awaken from sleep, as Paul says, and see that it is time to repent, time to change things.[i]

To that I say: Welcome to the season of Advent. It is a wake-up call to all who dare observe it, and the signs of its upending nature are all around. Much of our service this morning is different. The colors, the prayers, and even our opening procession, indicate that something new and strange has begun.

The tone of our readings, and the liturgy itself, has become quite serious, a characteristic that seems inappropriate for the Sunday after Thanksgiving and just a few weeks before Christmas. Something just feels off when you compare what we are doing in here to what the culture is preaching out there.

Advent lacks the requisite sentimentality. If anything, it feels like the liturgical shoe is on the wrong foot. We can walk this way to Christmas, but it would sure be more comfortable if we went back to how things were last week. Yet, Advent reminds us that we are not in Kansas anymore. Something has changed, and we are meant to change too.

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Fr. Delp was right, we modern folks need to be shaken. We need to be reminded that as we prepare to celebrate Christ’s Incarnation, he has promised to come again. Advent wants Jesus’ first coming to align our vision toward the dawning of his second advent.

Every Christian proclaims in the Creed that we believe Jesus “shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; [and his] kingdom shall have no end.” That is not a nice idea, but our genuine hope. Christ has died. Christ is risen. And we are confident he will come again.

The earliest Christians distilled this hope into a single word, “Maranatha.” (Come, O Lord). It shouldn’t surprise us that the early church was so focused on the end of the world because they believed they were living in the End Times.

God had come in the flesh. He had lived, died, and was triumphantly raised on the third day, only to then ascend to the right hand of the Father, and the subsequent outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples.

This was it. The Scriptures were all being fulfilled in their lifetime. The hour was at hand. God had fulfilled all things in his well-beloved Son. And so, “Maranatha. Come, O Lord.” There was nothing more to wait for on this earth than Christ to return.

But Jesus knew human nature; if we were kept waiting, our expectant hope of his coming would fade over time. It may have lasted for a few generations, but reality soon set in.

He was not coming back—at least not any time soon—and so most believers went about their daily lives with no thought to his return, while a small minority got out their calculators and began obsessively making senseless predictions.

That’s probably why Jesus left us with the story we heard in today’s Gospel. The day or hour, no one knows. While on the earth, even the Son of Man was shielded from knowing the day or hour.

And Jesus invited us mortals to join him in his eschatological agnosticism. By that, I mean we can be content not knowing when Jesus will return because he didn’t know either. Jesus’ words this morning are meant to be a gift to us, to lessen our anxiety and to fortify us for the days ahead.

“You don’t know when I’ll be back,” he told his disciples, “and right now I don’t know either, but you can be sure that I will come back. It will feel sudden, like a thief in the night when I do return, but be at peace, have courage, and be ready.”

The sin Jesus warned his followers to avoid in this passage is the sin of indifference.[ii] It is okay not to know when the Lord will return; it’s a whole other thing not to care.

The early church’s expectant hope waned as more pressing things arose, like persecution, or empire building, or the daily tasks that take up so much of our attention even now.

But hear Jesus’ words to us today: If we are solely concerned with what must be done today, that we have no thought of the Last Day—nor do we care if our Lord returns—then Jesus’ story of men and women being taken as they went about their daily tasks is supposed to shake us from our routines.

It is meant to broaden our vision from the ordinary toward the horizon of history and One who will usher in the Last Things. Jesus was telling us that The End is supposed to inform how we live today.

The present is filled with mundane tasks, but also with joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. According to Jesus, the great tribulations (as some obsess about) are not some final chapter before the end; no, that’s what life is right now: trial and tribulation.

Try telling someone living in a warzone or amid famine or who has been abused or tragically lost a loved one that the tribulations are still to come. They’d say, “I’m living the tribulations right now, thank you very much.”

Right now is the time of waiting, testing, and tribulation. We don’t have to wait for things to get worse before they get better. We are to live in the here and now, thankful for our daily bread and attentive to what God has tasked us with, while also never losing sight of Jesus’ return when he will set the world right. And oh, what a day that will be, when all is made right.

Jesus calls us to a real and present hope.

I began with Alfred Delp because I think his words are profoundly helpful in this holy season. But I forgot to mention that he wrote his Advent reflections while awaiting his trial and execution, in a cold Nazi prison.

Father Delp was not writing theoretically about the world’s shaking; he was being shaken. He had resisted the works of darkness, and it would cost him his mortal life. But from his dire situation, he found hope that spanned far beyond his present circumstances and into the eschaton and the renewal of all things.

His words become prophetic once you know his fate. He wrote:

The world today needs people who have been shaken by ultimate calamities and emerged from them with the knowledge and awareness that those who look to the Lord will still be preserved by him, even if they are hounded from the earth. The Advent message comes out of an encounter of man with the absolute, the final, the gospel. It is thus the message that shakes - so that in the end the world shall be shaken. The fact that then the Son of Man shall come is more than a historic prophecy; it is also a decree, that God’s coming and the shaking up of humanity are somehow connected.[iii]

Alfred Delp knew the end of the story; he knew that God had won the battle over Sin, Death, and the Devil once and for all, and that Christ would come again to reign over all things in his glorious majesty. The earthly powers may be able to kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul.

Because Father Delp knew the end of the story—and that he was a part of that story—he was able to face the present with an unshakable sense of courage and peace.

Whatever you are going through, whether you are overwhelmed by sorrow and fear, or you are consumed by the daily tasks of this life, hear the gospel’s decree: “Those who look to the Lord will still be preserved by him.”

And so set your life and your gaze toward the coming dawn of the Son of Man, who is our hope and our salvation.

Maranatha.

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[i] Alfred Delp in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (2007).

[ii] Dale Bruner’s Matthew: A Commentary Vol. 2, p. 522

[iii] Alfred Delp in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (2007).