A new year, a new season, and the same wait. We are at the beginning of a new liturgical year. And curiously, the new year doesn't start with a feast, but rather with a period of waiting. The entire point of Christian life is about waiting, as Bishop Barron puts it. "We are an advent people. Israel was an advent people. The Church is an Advent Church." St. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians famously said, "Love is patient." If God is love, and we are made to love him, then we have to be patient. And that's what Advent teaches us—to wait.
If you have trouble being patient, you're not alone. We live in a world where we don't have to be patient. Everything is just a click away. And sometimes we see our spiritual lives in the same light. We believe our prayers must be answered immediately or they are simply not effective. It wasn't a serious study, but one of my friends at Church once said, "I went back to see all the requests I made to God last year and he fulfilled about 95% of them." If we do the same exercise, we see that God fulfills most of our serious requests, so long as it is good for us and in line with his will for our lives.
But what are we waiting for? In my previous posts, I talked a lot about the Cross and the Resurrection and surely Christianity wouldn't be a religion if Christ didn't die on the Cross and rise again on the third day. Christianity however isn't just a religion of the past. It isn't just a religion for the middle ages or for the 21st century, it is a religion of all ages, and especially of the end times. Christians have always believed that their Lord, Jesus, will come again in glory. We wait and hope for Christ to come again.
If Christ has already come and comes to us everyday in prayer, then why are we hung up on his second coming. I don't wish to go into the theology or cite every verse from Saint Paul talking about Christ's return, but let me just say that Christ's second coming will be more wonderful than his first. The first coming did change the world quite a bit. In just four centuries, the most powerful empire of its time, Rome, would go from persecuting Christians to becoming Christian.
The second coming will however be definite. It will be the day of our final judgement. Judgement sounds scary because we think of judgement with human eyes. We judge people and it feels horrible to be judged by others. But God is different. He doesn't judge us on what we have done but he judges with the metric of love. We have been created through love, we have been created for love and created to be loved. If we have lived a life of love, we have nothing to fear when Christ returns in glory. If we've failed to love, then we have to fear his return.
All of us have failed to love as we should, and here again God's way of seeing us is very different to the way we see ourselves and see others. God is infinitely merciful. And in his mercy, he is willing to forgive all our sins in an instant. The only thing he is asking is for us to acknowledge our sinfulness and our desire to love. God, however, also knows that we all desire love and if we sometimes live as if we don't, it's because of our brokenness. That's why he sent his only Son Jesus to come and rescue us.
In less than four weeks, we will be celebrating the feast of our Lord's Nativity. We will remember how God renewed the world through incarnation and hope for his second coming with great trust. When he come to Earth for the first time two thousand years ago, he showed great mercy to sinners. He lived and dined with tax collectors and prostitutes. He didn't discriminate between the Jew and the Greek, between man and woman, the clean and the leper, the saint and the sinner. He loved all of them.
When he comes again, he will want to see if we have loved others in the same way he has loved us. It is impossible to love like Jesus all the time. But Jesus isn't asking for moral perfection, he is asking for our desire to love. If we are constantly striving to love more and be more like Jesus, we can be confident that his second coming will not be scary, and it will certainly be a moment of jubilation.
It will be like Christmas night, but only much better. During the first coming, Christ came in the middle of night, hidden from the sight of the world. During his second coming, he will be visible to all humanity at once. If his purpose during the first coming was to save us from death and sin, his second coming has a much bigger purpose—to give us eternal life, once and for all. All we need to do is to wait. Waiting isn't something passive. It's active. We wait as the servants waited for their master's return in Christ's time. We prepare a sumptuous dinner and we stake awake, so that when Christ comes again, he is welcomed rather than put to death.
So, during Advent, let us prepare ourselves for the great event of the future by growing in love. Everyday, let us ask ourselves, "have I loved today?" Let us also spend more time with the Holy Scriptures and grow also in faith and hope. Christ will come again. There is no question about that. We don't know when but we do know with certainty that he will. Love is patient. Let us love God and his people patiently until he comes again. He will not disappoint.
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