There has been no shortage of predictions of the end of the world. A quick look at Wikipedia will require scrolling through several pages, and centuries, of estimates about the end of the world. In the seventeenth century, the Anglican bishop James Ussher famously, or infamously, predicted both the date of creation and the end of the world. In case you’re wondering, God created everything that exists around 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 B.C., and the world was supposed to come to an end on October 23, 1997.
It’s easy, in hindsight, to write off people like Bishop Ussher who devoted, or still devote, hours and hours of time calculating when the end of time will be. And while all end-time predictions so far have, of course, been wrong, according to contemporary forecasters, Armageddon can still occur in the remaining days of 2020, or irrelevantly for those of us in this room, in 2280.
But these fascinating predictions of that Last Day are indicative of a deeply inquisitive streak running throughout human nature. Before we laugh at Bishop Ussher or scoff at the Left Behind series, we might examine ourselves and realize the extent to which we are all influenced by this desire to know when it will all end, or at least, just how things are.
This hunger for certain mysterious knowledge is as old as creation itself. According to the Book of Genesis, it was at the dawn of creation, that Adam and Eve felt irresistibly drawn to a fruit in the midst of the Garden of Eden. Was it really an apple? We may never know, but even the desire to specify the particular fruit in the garden has been the fascination of people’s curious brains.
Adam and Eve’s illicit eating of the fruit in the garden can imply that it was a harmful fruit, almost as if it were something naughty that they should avoid out of prudish discipline. For the serpent in the garden, the fruit was simply God’s insecure way of keeping the upper hand with Adam and Eve. But as much as we like to speculate about why the fruit was off limits and why it was off limits, Scripture never provides us with the answers to these questions. In any case, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, and the rest is history.
We might take our very human interpretations of that seminal story to be evidence of the story’s very point. The point seems to be that God had decreed that Adam and Eve not eat of the fruit of a particular tree in the garden. And because this seemed arbitrary, Adam and Eve employed creative casuistry, aided by the serpent, to justify eating at least some fruit in the garden. What everyone seemed incapable of understanding was that God said they shouldn’t eat of the fruit. End of story.
It would appear from the Genesis story and also from today’s Gospel reading that there is some knowledge that we are indeed simply not supposed to know. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ description of the Second Coming, even Jesus does not know when that hour will be; only his Father in heaven does.
And this is simply not acceptable to the modern human mind. We might even say that it’s not acceptable to the human mind, period. Clearly, Adam and Eve didn’t want to respect the limitations God put on them. Someone like Bishop Ussher, while not expressly transgressing one of God’s commandments, was obviously tempted by the fruit of knowing unknowable things with certainty. And all this when, according to Mark, even the Son of Man himself does not know that hour. Not to mention that it’s clear that Mark’s expectation about an imminent Second Coming was dead wrong.
Jesus’ own lack of knowledge about something so significant as the end of the world has perplexed theologians and Biblical scholars for ages. Once again, we find evidence of a very consistently human problem: we don’t like not knowing, and the assumption is that if we were just a bit more sophisticated or worked a bit harder, we could solve the mystery.
And we especially hate it when God seems to command things that seem arbitrary. What’s wrong with that fruit in the garden? What’s wrong with knowing when the end of the world will be? What’s wrong with a bit more clarity added to the large mass of mystery?
Scripture itself is not much help since God often seems deliberately to hide things from humankind. We don’t like this either because it seems like God is playing games with us. We want our God to be straightforward and to play by our rules, and if God doesn’t, then it requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to solve the riddle.
And so, we are back where we started, with the fundamental reality that at the root of human nature is a desire for control, knowledge, and certainty. Our perpetual attempts to conquer this dilemma are constantly vexed. So, perhaps we should try another way into this conundrum. What if we asked a different question? What if we assume that the limits on our knowledge are precisely where we meet God most fully?
I think that, among many reasons, the coronavirus pandemic has incapacitated so many people because it has revealed what we do not know. The vast death toll and astonishing numbers of sick people are astoundingly tragic, and behind these sober statistics is a large mystery. We don’t know why supposedly healthy people have fallen ill. Even though we know more about the virus now than last March, we are still frequently told by scientists that there’s much we don’t know about the virus. And hence, we are urged to exercise great caution. What we do know is both disturbing and frightening.
We don’t know when we will have access to a vaccine. We don’t know if the virus will mutate and come back with a greater vengeance in the future. We don’t know what lasting effects the virus has on those who’ve contracted it. We don’t know what life on the other side of this pandemic will look like. We don’t even know who will be left standing when it’s all said and done. There’s so much we don’t know.
We return, then, to our new question: why does a gracious God hide, or at least appear to hide, certain knowledge from us? And is it possible that this is the benevolent gesture of a loving God? Could it be then, that this Advent, we are especially confronted with a more profound understanding of what it means to wait for God?
We all know what it’s like to wait, and most of the time, it’s not a pleasant sensation. Does your heart still drop when you remember waiting for a loved one to come home late at night, fearing for their safety? Do you remember waiting for the college admissions letter? Have you waited for the results of a serious medical test?
This, I think, is not the kind of waiting that God has in mind when our lack of knowledge and control forces us to wait for him. The Gospel reading causes us to imagine anxious servants, riddled by insomnia, because they don’t want to miss the arrival of their master. How many Christians now, too, live in deep fear of a final judgment that will consign them to eternal flames? How many people perform good works or pious acts ultimately because they are terrified of a vengeful God? Their whole life becomes waiting in fear.
But if we turn the focus from the future and the end to the present, waiting takes on a different quality. Waiting becomes about the present, about waiting for God to meet us, to judge our present, and to make it new again. Waiting invites us to encounter the mystery of God, to embrace it, and to let it convert us, without our needing to master it.
I frequently wonder what would happen if we knew the exact day that we would have a coronavirus vaccine injected into our bodies. Would we then throw caution to the wind because an end was in sight? Or would we live each day with our minds only on the future?
And isn’t this how some Christians live their lives? This present reality is only something to be escaped, so do whatever you want. Forget about the environment. Forget about your neighbor. Forget about anything except yourself because in the end, it’s between you and God.
And maybe this is precisely why we need to wait for God. Could it be that God’s gift to us in waiting is to give up our control and learn to love the sacrament of the present moment? Are we to learn to embrace the mystery of God and therefore embrace the mystery of our neighbor?
Advent is not so much about waiting for Christmas but about God coming to us and about our waiting patiently and expectantly for him. God has something to teach us now, right now, in the present moment. And at the heart of that teaching is Jesus, Emmanuel, God with Us. God is with us, now. Not just in the future awaiting the chance to judge the whole of our lives once and for all, but now, in our frustrating lack of knowledge, in our pain, and in our consternation. God is judging us now, so that the rest of our lives can be about living with the mystery of God with Us.
For Christ is coming. He is coming soon, but at the same time, the King, who draws nigh, is already at the door. He stands knocking, and unless you are awake and joyfully expectant in this present time, you’ll miss his knock. So, open the door, right now, and let him in.
A Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday of Advent
November 29, 2020