[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]
We hear holy words from our Lord Jesus today. He is speaking to Peter, James, John, and Andrew, and it is from these four Saints that His teaching has come down to us. They had asked him about the Temple, and Jesus had foretold to them the destruction of the Temple. And in speaking about the destruction of the Temple, our Lord spoke as well about the chaos that would ensue. This chaos would include false prophets and teachers supposing to speak in Christ’s Name. It would include wars and rumours of wars. It would include earthquakes and famines in various places. And all this would, Jesus said to the four Saints, be but the beginning of the sufferings.
And about those our Lord surely meant the persecutions that He foretold, that as the disciples would bear testimony in synagogues and preach the Gospel to all nations, that they would also be brought to trial. Jesus instructed them not to be anxious about what they are to say. He assured them that the Holy Spirit would give them utterance, as He gave Moses the words to say before Pharaoh and the children of Israel. And yet He warned them that they would be hated for His Name’s sake. But that through it all, Jesus said, He who endures to the end will be saved, thereby teaching that the virtue of Fortitude is necessary to the Christian life.
It was then that our Gospel passage picks up the narrative from Saint Mark. In speaking about the days after Jesus is crucified and resurrected – that is, in speaking about the life of the Church – Jesus said that the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers (that is, the angels) in the heavens will be shaken. All of this is symbolic, figurative description of the life of the Church Militant that fights against the Prince of this world (I am speaking of the Devil and his unholy army of fallen angels). While the Church in heaven is triumphant and at rest, the Church on earth (the Church Militant) is fighting against the Devil who is ever luring people on earth to works of darkness.
And this happens in several ways: We the Church are the people of Light, and it is the Church that fights against the darkness which is people walking in the darkness which is the state of spiritual deadness. Another way this happens is within the Church, for the Church Militant on earth is sometimes caught up in heresy and schism, most famously perhaps in the fourth century when most of the bishops of the Church accepted the teaching of a bishop named Arius, which was a heretical teaching that came to be known as Arianism: that Jesus, while unique and prophetic unlike any human being, was not co-eternal with the Father, but was a creature and not God the Son. It was only a small minority of Bishops who believed what we do today: that Christ is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father. We owe so much to those fourth Century Church Fathers who fought back the heresy – Church Fathers such as Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Athanasius the Great, as well as Saint Nicholas of Myra, and Saint Anthony the Monk.
And of course fighting the Devil’s constant enticements to works of darkness happens in the heart of every person, in the heart of every Christian. We are all awaiting the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory, to judge both the quick and the dead. Jesus assures us that no matter what of the world dies and passes away, but His words will never pass away. And when He tells us to “watch,” He surely means in the sense that He taught His disciples to abide in His words, to love His words, and to keep His words. But He in emphasizing twice the necessity to watch – because we do not know when the master of the house will come, that is, when Christ will come in His glory at the end of days – lest He come suddenly and find us asleep, He says to us as He said to Peter, James, John, and Andrew: Watch.
What are we to watch? We are to watch our heart. Watch what catches our heart. Watch what our heart follows and is enamored by. Is it Christ? Or is it an idol we put before Christ? We say we believe in Christ, but does our heart agree with our words? We have, as Saint Paul affirms, all speech and knowledge that we need to be enriched and fed by Christ. Paul says the Church and her members are not lacking any spiritual gift. And Paul also assures us that God is faithful. All God wants is our heart. Let us, my dear brothers and sisters, again get our hearts right, that in His coming to us, we have made room in our hearts to receive Him – that our heart not made to sleep by worship of idols, but is ever awake to Christ and rejoices at His coming. Amen.
On Advent and Watching