Year A
Matthew 24:37-44
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Are You Ready?
Today is the first day of a new church year…Happy New Year! I might ask you what resolutions you have made and you would probably look at me and think what? This is the end of November, not January 1. We rarely think of the church’s new year as a time for new resolutions, but this is exactly what we are called to do today as we begin this rather short season of Advent; a season filled with hope and expectation where we are challenged to rethink our goals and to place our focus on Jesus in a new way by allowing him to take center stage in our lives. When we place Jesus as the center, the promise of this new year is the promise that in spite of our resistance to the grace of God, despite our reluctance to allow God’s love to be in us, God has not and will not give up on us.
How comforting and reassuring to know because in Advent, our thoughts are already beginning to become directed toward Christmas, but the Advent readings with their stark and conflicting images of dark and light, present and future, destruction and reconciliation will all point to a new way of marking time that is not devoted to preparing for Christmas. That begins, only one week before the feast itself. For now, Advent is our time of making ourselves ready-prepared for the Christ child at his birth and ready-prepared for his coming again when the Son of Man will suddenly return and lives will be suddenly and surprisingly changed. Advent calls us to anticipate the day on which our Messiah will return as King of kings and Lord of lords.
This emphasis on Christ’s return in Advent seems to produce two different reactions. There are some who tend to think that the whole idea of Christ returning to earth someday is much ado about nothing. I mean it’s been over two thousand years and nothing has happened yet. Then there are others who believe that Christ’s second coming is the very heart of the gospel. They search the Bible for signs of the end times and they search the newspaper to see if those signs are yet in view. Those who tend to care less about last things are tempted to fall into a state of apathy and those who are so focused on last things, are tempted to fall into a state of anxiety. This passage today from Matthew encourages neither. Instead, it encourages faith rather than apathy and hope rather than anxiety.
Matthew reminds us that God is still in control over human history and Jesus tells us in this section of scripture that the God who created history at the beginning does not only drive history but also history’s goal. We will hear a lot from Matthew in this new church year, year A in the Liturgical cycle. Matthew was Jewish and his Gospel what written for the Jewish community around a decade after the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E. His purpose, as we shall discover this year, was to present Jesus as the Messiah to the Jewish people and to encourage the people to be prepared for the coming again of the Son of Man. Having been trained in the Jewish tradition and scriptures, he was able to make connections between the Old Testament prophecies and the life of Jesus.
In the text today, Matthew tells of Jesus’ conversation with his disciples where he uses examples of those who were not ready or prepared for his coming again. To set the stage for this conversation, the disciples have just asked Jesus, “What will be the sign of his coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus had given them cause to think in his conversations with them that this was going to happen soon but by the time Matthew is writing his gospel after the destruction of the temple, many of those first Christians have died and people are wondering when this new world would appear. So Matthew is reminding them of Jesus’ words, “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Then, taking them back to the days of Noah, Jesus reminded them of how the Old Testament people in Noah’s time did not take God and God’s call to readiness seriously. Like them, we go on living in a business-as-usual manner.
The second example that Jesus uses is that of two people working beside each other. One will be taken and one will be left when the Son of Man returns. The final example is the unwary householder who fails to anticipate the hour at which the thief will break in. The point of these examples is that it is important that we are ready for the Lord at any time. When Christ finally appears, those who are ready will be saved. The question each one of us has to ask ourselves is am I ready for Christ’s return? Matthew is not trying to scare us into belief, although it sometimes sounds like it, he wants to encourage us toward being prepared and to trust.
We are God’s people and the history that we live in is God’s story. Our hope is founded in God and the example Jesus gives us with his life, death and resurrection is to be a people able to trust in the future without even knowing the details of what is yet to come. We can look forward without apathy or anxiety because we can look back. We have learned that looking back can be essential to moving ahead. By looking back at what God has done we can have confidence in what God will do in the future, in God’s own time. We wait in hope because we wait with memory. Think about those times in your own life that showed God’s presence and promise. Those times, I’m sure, helped you to look to the future with faith. Memory, along with faith and hope, all help us to know that God can be trusted to do what God has promised.
We just need to be reminded that during our waiting we are to keep awake, to be watchful, and to respond by “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans. Paul tells us we already know what time it is. The end times are ever nearer, so do not delay and do not procrastinate. Start living now as though this new day has already begun and when we do this our focus goes from anxiety to gratitude and we remember that we have been called and gifted to do God’s work in God’s kingdom now and to leave the future in God’s hands. We are called to believe out of a genuine desire to listen for “the trumpet” and to live the abundant life and the best way to experience what abundant life is to be ready for the Lord’s return at all time.
We have the opportunity during this brief season of Advent, amidst the merriment and excitement of the coming Christmas to take time out to prepare ourselves for the coming of the Lord and to prepare the way of the Lord. So let us take time out of our busy schedules to realize how close Jesus is to each one of us, how much we are loved by God and called to bring this love to our world. By welcoming Jesus into our lives again, we prepare our hearts to receive him, whenever he shows up. Happy New Year! Now unto God the Father, and God the Son whose second coming in power and great glory we await, and God the Holy Spirit who helps us be steadfast in faith, joyful in hope and constant in love, all honor and glory be yours now and forever amen.