Simon’s Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent
Advent is a future-focussed season. The words of Advent all have a future-focus about them. The word itself means “coming.” Something important is coming and the words associated with the season have a future-focus. We think of words like waiting, longing, preparing, expectancy, readiness, hope.
So what is coming? One thing that is coming is Christmas and Advent is partly a time of preparation for Christmas; of getting our hearts ready for Christmas. But that’s only part of its meaning and our readings today point us forward to the Second Coming of Jesus and ask us questions as to our belief and trust that God holds the future. Do we really believe that and do we live as though we do?
So what do we think about the future at the moment? I wonder if we were to go back in time one year, as we approached the year 2020, what we would have been expecting. Perhaps we might have been wondering about where we might go on holiday. Perhaps we might have been wondering about what a 2020 vision would look like for the church; it had a nice ring to it that phrase! Perhaps, we may have been thinking that life would unfold through the year much as it normally does. Well what is it they say: “life is what happens when we are making other plans.”
Maybe there were some people who had an inkling something like this could happen but I doubt whether many of us expected it. I certainly didn’t. It has shown us all too painfully that life is uncertain in certain key respects though we may have a tendency to forget that and live as if it were not so. Advent addresses the question what is certain and what is uncertain. Can the things that are certain help us to live with the uncertainties?
One response to uncertainty is to want to know what is going to happen in the future. To know what is going to happen in the future is a very human desire. It is one that keeps fortune-tellers in business! Whether it would be a good thing if we could know more about the future, I don’t know. It is certainly difficult to live if we dread the future and if we can’t face the future with a credible and grounded sense of hope. So how do we think about the future and how does our faith in Christ fit into that?
Today’s gospel passage is prompted by a question from Jesus’s disciples about what was going to happen in the future. Advent begins a new year in the church and this year’s gospel readings will be mainly from St Mark’s gospel.
In Mark chapter 13, we are given an account of a last discourse to the disciples before Holy Week. The discussion is prompted by a visit to the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple and the disciples ask Jesus about when these things will happen and what will be the signs. In the chapter Jesus is partly talking about the destruction of the temple and there are very good reasons for believing that Jesus did prophesy the destruction of the temple but is usually assumed, though not by everyone, that he is talking about the end of the world and the Second Coming in some of the verses we heard today though again the times he is referring to may be a bit mixed up.
The passage repeats a message that is found elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching. The future is not entirely knowable and even the earthly Jesus has to live with a level of uncertainty which is surely partly what it means to be human. No-one knows when exactly these things will happen he says. Even Jesus Himself doesn’t know. Only the Heavenly Father knows.
Jesus makes predictions of course. He also says that there will be false dawns. Famously, in this passage he predicts “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” If Jesus said this, did he mistakenly believe that the world would end within a generation I wonder? Certainly, many in the early church seemed to have believed the end of the world was imminent. Is the earthly Jesus, like us, sometimes mistaken about what will happen in the future? Or was he talking about something else; the Fall of Jerusalem in ad 70 or the Resurrection or Ascension. These are all suggestions that have been made.
At any rate the passage says that we can’t know some things but we can know others. We can know that God is faithful. Heaven and earth may pass away but my words will not pass away. God will be to us in the future as he has been in the past. The prophet knows this in our Old Testament passage. As he laments the apparent absence of God in the present, he still knows that God will not give up on his people. God is the potter and they are the clay. God is here for us in the present too. We don’t have to wait for the future to know him. We can get greater strength to face the future by holding on to those things which are certain and seeking for God and listening for God in the here and now.
Jesus tells the disciples that they can look to the signs of the times. They can learn from experience if they are listening in the right way and if they are alert. The ripening of the fig tree is a sign that summer is on its way.
God’s light is shining in the darkness. We don’t have to generate that light. We just have to look for it, to see it and to reflect it.
We are all waiting at the moment. We are all very much in Advent. Are we waiting with hope or dread? Are we seeing signs that summer is on its way? The Advent call is as powerful as ever and it is to live for the good future that God is bringing into being and to help Him bring it into being and to live for the future that is real and not one that is imagined. Our faith tells us that the future that is real is much better than any future we could imagine. Thanks be to God. Amen.