First Sunday of Advent EMM Reflection by Rushad Thomas
“And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” Mark 13:37
Because Advent is a season of preparation for our celebration of the FIRST coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, it can often be lost on us that the scripture lessons we hear during the Sunday Eucharist in this season point instead to the SECOND coming of the Savior. We are admonished by the Evangelist to “keep awake,” because we do not know when the master of the house will return. St. Mark’s call to vigilance is not merely a personal, individual call to be alert to the implications of Jesus’s imminent coming. It is also a collective call to recognize that time is short, the hour is near, and we must together work urgently to build God’s kingdom on earth.
When the Savior returns, what kind of world will greet him? Will he return to a world in which we, his body, have lived together into the vision of God’s loving liberating, and life-giving Gospel? There are many ways in which the Christian community does this, every day: every family that’s fed by a parish soup kitchen, every underprivileged child educated by our schools, every lonely senior who enjoys the company of a Eucharistic visitor. Christians around the world go above and beyond the call of Christ to spread his transformative love to their fellow man.
But there are so many ways in which Christians fall short of the Gospel’s call. No society transformed by the Gospel of Jesus Christ would allow immigrant children at the border to be ripped from the arms of their parents. No “Christ-haunted culture,” to borrow a phrase from Flannery O’Connor, would deport people brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own back to an alien land. No nation whose God is the Lord would turn its back on vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers fleeing persecution and conflict.
Indeed, He is coming quickly. When he does, will he find a nation and a world prepared to receive him? Let us continue, in this new church year, to beg the Lord for the grace and strength to show his radical love to our immigrant brothers and sisters, so that when he comes again, we can say to him: Yes, Lord, we were awake. May we live forever in the awareness of your love.