Homily for 1st Sunday of Advent

Homily for the
1st Sunday of Advent

Nov. 30, 2025
Matt 24: 37-44
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx 

The Last Judgment (by Viktor Vasnetsov)

“You also must be prepared, for at an hour you don’t expect, the Son of Man will come” (Matt 24: 44).

We’ve begun the Advent season and a new church year.  As it always does, the new year flows out of the year just ended.  We’ve heard St. Luke’s version of the end times and Christ’s 2d Coming, and last week in particular we heard Christ’s judgment—a very happy one—on the so-called Good Thief, who asked Jesus to remember him and was promised paradise that very day.

During Advent, we’re asked to do the remembering—to remember 3 comings of Christ.  The 1st is a historical memory:  he came over 2,000 years ago as a tiny infant at Bethlehem.  We celebrate that memory on Dec. 25.  (Despite all the music you’re hearing now and the ads you’re seeing, the authentic Christmas season begins with the vigil Mass on Dec. 24.)

The 2d coming to remember is that Christ wants to come to us right now—to our hearts, our souls, and our lives.  That’s what makes his 1st coming real.  We don’t have to wait for him.  He’s here in the Eucharist; he’s here in the sacred Scriptures; he’s here whenever we invite him in with prayer; he’s here when we resist temptation because we belong to him.

The 3d coming of Christ is the one proclaimed in today’s gospel, the one we confess every week in the Creed:  “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  When he will come is unknown, and we don’t need to know.  We need only to be ready, i.e., to stand in his grace, to stand ready to welcome him, as we prayed in the collect:  “to run forth to meet [our] Christ with righteous deeds.”

Altho we don’t know when Christ will return in glory, we do know with absolute certainty that at some moment we will have to stand before him for personal judgment.  Jesus says of the people of Noah’s time, “In those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking and marrying….  They didn’t know until the flood came and carried them all away” (24:38-39).  The people working in the World Trade Center on 9/11 didn’t know their hour was at hand.  The 135 people swept away by the Guadalupe River in central Texas last July 4 didn’t know their hour was at hand.  For each of us, knowing the day and the hour doesn’t matter.  Being prepared for the Son of Man is what matters.  That’s in our hands in this Advent season and in every season.  “Therefore, stay awake!” (24:42).  Be prepared for your Lord’s coming, so that you may receive a happy remembrance like the Good Thief.