At the beginning of the Church’s year, paradoxically, we’re asked to consider the end. More precisely, our end. God is the home of our longing, the aim of our living, our flourishing. And the point of our living is to become able to respond to his invitation, to ‘go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the Temple of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways so that we may walk in his paths’. Isaiah’s vision of the eschatological fulfilment of Jerusalem looks beyond Jerusalem to humans walking with God once more, living in peace with God and with each other.
Matthew’s parable of vigilance stresses our need to respond to this challenge here and now. He focuses neither on the sins of Noah’s generation nor on Noah’s righteousness but upon the unexpected nature of the cataclysm that overtook the world while people went about their daily business unawares. While emphasising a strong sense of God’s action in history, and expressing the hope that the just will be vindicated, Matthew sets the scene firmly in the present moment. Eschatology spills into ethics, for Christians are to live as if the coming of the Son of Man is imminent, as if we are about to submit to the judgement of Christ. The comparisons about one being taken, one left, also emphasise the eschatological urgency. The men in the fields or the women at the millstone are doing the same tasks and are therefore indistinguishable in human terms, but one will be taken and another left at the coming of the Son of Man, at Christ’s coming in judgement.
We need to wake up, as Paul exhorts the Romans, to realise that we are already living in the last days. Our salvation is at hand, indeed, is upon us, and we must respond to the time in which we live with vigilant conduct; make manifest by our actions that we are living the new life of the kingdom of God. The time of salvation has begun, even if it is not yet fully revealed; but we are to think of the Lord’s patience as our opportunity to be saved.
Many thanks for the first of your Advent meditations.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to read them all (Deo volente).