First Sunday of Advent
Is 2:1-5; Rom 13:11-14; Mt 24:37-44 (Year C)
The season of Advent summons us to both joy and wakefulness. Joy, because it prepares us for the celebration of the Lord’s first coming at Christmas; wakefulness, because it invites us to live in the confident expectation of his Second Coming at the end of time: “Therefore, you too must stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
The prophet Isaiah, speaking from the experience of Jerusalem’s headlong decline and its destruction in 597 BC, rallied a broken people to renewed hope. Each and every generation, our own included, inevitably experiences times when the darkness threatens, when we cannot see a way forward, when both faith and hope feel spent.
