1st Sunday of Advent
Nov. 27, 2016
Collect
Holy Cross, Champaign, Ill.
“Grant your faithful the
resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so
that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly
kingdom” (Collect).
The 1st Sunday of Advent
always draws our attention to the 2d coming of Christ, continuing the focus of
the 33d Sunday of OT and the feast of Christ the King. Advent’s attention will gradually shift to
preparing to celebrate Christ’s birth in time 2,000 years ago; yet we know that
birth is an unrepeatable historical event.
And we know that this same Jesus Christ has promised to return, to come
again, to complete the work of our salvation that he began with his
incarnation.
Today’s Collect is loaded
with meaning. As usual, we need time and
attention to unpack that meaning, to understand what we’re praying, to enter
our prayer more deeply.
The Collect—like all the
collects of the Roman Missal—is a humble petition addressed to the Divine
Majesty. This is brought out much more
forcefully in the new translation we’ve been using for 5 years: “grant, we pray….” We don’t demand of God but plead with
him. We sinners aren’t in a position to
demand, no matter how faith-filled we may be, no matter how confident we may be
in the Father’s amazing grace.
Our prayer this morning is
for “resolve to run forth to meet your Christ.”
As you know, Christ isn’t
Jesus of Nazareth’s last name but a title:
the Greek translation of Messiah,
“anointed one.” Those who were anointed
were designated for some special purpose by God, mainly kings and priests in
the OT, and in the later OT period, the one expected to liberate God’s people
from all their oppressors, the Son of David.
We affirm that Jesus of Nazareth is that Anointed One of God.
We pray for
“resolve.” That word implies a strong
will, perseverance, determination. For,
assuredly, there are many things to distract us from attending to our Christian
discipleship, from thinking about Christ’s coming and the 4 last things, from
considering our ultimate destiny. Our
sins may discourage us from thinking about all that or from wanting to meet
Christ—meeting him on the Last Day or perhaps meeting him on this day, Nov. 27. So we need resolve—as a gift from God—to get
ready for death, judgment, and eternity (either heaven or hell).
But we’re praying for more
than a steely determination; more than a British stiff upper lip, as we prepare
for Jesus. We pray that we might “run
forth to meet your Christ.” Picture a
child running to meet Mom or Dad coming home from work, or a spouse charging
into the arms of a returning soldier.
What emotions are there? We hope,
we pray, that we might look for, desire, be eager for Christ’s return in such a
way.
To welcome Christ like
that, we need to have “righteous deeds.”
How many parables warn us not to come to him empty-handed!—e.g., the
parable of the talents (Matt 25:14-30; cf. Luke 19:12-27), the parable of the
wise and foolish virgins (Matt 25:1-13), the parable of the last judgment (Matt
25:31-46), to which our prayer alludes explicitly. St. Paul exhorts us to “throw off the works
of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Rom 13:12), to rid ourselves of
vices of the flesh and the spirit (13:13) that are just as rife and just as
culturally acceptable today as in the 1st century, and just as much works of
darkness and not of light, and to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14), who
is the light of the world, the light that shines in the darkness (cf. John 1:5). If we have clothed ourselves in Christ, put
on his protective armor against the weapons of the Enemy of our souls, by doing
what Jesus did, speaking as Jesus did—deeds and words of light—then we will, as
the psalm response (Ps 122) says, “go rejoicing to the house of the Lord,” to
our heavenly home. Do you remember the
announcement of John Paul the Great’s death on April 2, 2005, how the cardinal
told the world simply, “Dearest brothers and sisters,
at 9:37 p.m., our beloved Father John Paul II returned to the house of the
Father”? This is what JP II was created
for, and what we also are created for; the house of the Father is the
destination of the earthly pilgrimage that we’re all on.
When we’ve filled our
lives with righteous deeds—when we have our lamps filled with oil, lit and
burning brightly, like the wise virgins of our Lord’s parable in Matt 25, or
like the house owner in today’s mini-parable who should keep vigil against
burglars (Matt 24:43)—then we’ll be ready to greet Christ at his coming, will
run forth to meet him like children who’ve missed their parent for days or
weeks away—even if Christ comes “at an hour you do not expect” (24:44); for we
have no guarantee we’ll be warned of the coming of the end: “of that day and hour no one knows … but the
Father alone” (24:36), Jesus says in the verse that immediately precedes the
gospel passage we read this evening/morning.
The “resolve” we pray for
touches on these “righteous deeds.” How
can a follower of Christ live righteously in this world without resolve? Following Christ, we all know, requires
constant vigilance, resistance to evil, no compromising of principles,
repentance of our failings, renewal of our baptismal (and vocational)
commitment. “I heartily resolve to sin
no more,” we say in the traditional Act of Contrition most of us learned many
years ago. It’s a resolve we need to
renew every day.
Of course, a resolve to
avoid sin and “the near occasions of sin”—or, in the words many of our young
people now use, “whatever leads me to sin”—is only a beginning, rather like a
student resolving to do the bare minimum of schoolwork to avoid an F. As Jesus’ followers, we need to resolve to
imitate him in doing good, in practicing virtue—the “righteous deeds” for which
we’ve prayed in the Collect.
The Collect goes on to
refer to those “gathered at his right hand.”
In Mark’s version of Jesus’ words about the Last Day, Jesus says that the
angels will “gather his elect” from the far reaches of the world (Mark
13:27). (One objective of the new
translation of the Missal was to capture more of the biblical allusions in the
prayers, and you have an example of that in this prayer.)
These elect, these
faithful, are “gathered at [Christ’s] right hand.” That’s an allusion to the parable of the
coming of the Son of Man and the last judgment in Matt 25, at which the sheep of
his flock will be placed at his right hand and rewarded for their righteous
deeds of mercy: feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned, welcoming strangers—and
the goats placed at his left hand will be condemned to hell for their lack of
merciful deeds.
The final line of the
Collect begs that “they may be worthy
to possess the heavenly kingdom.”
Interesting lack of presumption there!
We don’t automatically count ourselves among the faithful, among the
elect; we don’t say “we may be
worthy.” It’s a humble prayer for
everyone, and we can only hope (and pray) that our kind and merciful Savior
will include us—but we don’t presume to say so out loud.
What we pray for is more
than mere presence in the kingdom, like being a spectator in the galleries of
Congress. We ask to be worthy of
“possessing” the kingdom. What a difference
from just being there. God has made us
his children, and he has promised us an inheritance alongside his Son, places
of honor in the heavenly kingdom.
May God’s abundant grace
empower us to live righteously so as to look forward eagerly (without anxiety)
for Christ’s coming, so as to be joined with our Savior in the glory of his
kingdom, forever and ever!
