Reflection for November 27

Reading - Isaiah 2:1-5
Gospel - Matthew 24:37-44

Advent — adventus in Latin — is the word for an anticipated arrival, and that is what all of today’s readings are about. Isaiah awaits “in days to come” the establishment of the Lord’s house on his holy mountain, when the nations and their peoples “will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, when one nation will not raise the sword against another, nor train for war again.”

But, when exactly, we ask and wonder, will that time be? Paul tells the Romans — his “brothers and sisters” — that they know at least this much about that time: it is “nearer than when they first believed.” And that is clearly all the more true for us, who two millennia later await the final coming of Christ and his peaceable kingdom.

In the gospel, Jesus reminds his disciples, and us by extension, that the Son of Man will come on a day and at an hour we don’t expect. The fact that, counting from today, there are twenty-eight days of spiritual wakefulness and preparation, as well as twenty-eight shopping days ‘til Christmas, is honestly beside the point, because we simply “do not know on which day our Lord will come.”

So where does this leave us today, on the first Sunday of Advent? We already know the answer to that. We are, as Jesus instructs us, to “stay awake” and “be prepared” — prepared, among other things, to “beat our swords into plowshare.” Abraham Joshua Heschel, a modern prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, had this to say to us, a warlike nation in a world at war: “The most basic way [people are] divided, is between those who believe that war is unnecessary and those who believe that war is inevitable; between those who believe that the sword is the symbol of honor and those to whom seeking to convert swords into plowshares is the only way to keep our civilization from disaster.”

Machiavelli — that ultimate “realist” and consummate cynic — claimed that war is indeed inevitable, in fact, the natural state of humanity. He advised, therefore, that even in times of peace we should train for war. We, today, on the threshold of Advent, affirm and embrace a very different reality, and await, in longing and faith, the coming of the kingdom of peace and love.

Bob Meagher