“BE ON the watch!” The command to “keep awake” shouldn’t be one which I find naturally attractive. Staying awake when exhausted is hard, even with the assistance of a caffeine habit. Flashbacks to a sudden snap out of drowsiness while doing an extended motorway drive prove it. The converse can be true, as we may reflect while staring into darkness, perhaps with added fuming if our bed-companion’s respiration taunts us with their restfulness.
Framing the divine command as a warning is an acknowledgement of how hard it could be to stay up. When our youngsters are small, we survive cruel-and-unusual-punishment levels of sleep deprivation. Even easy things turn into difficult for brains deprived of down-time.
We must reimagine the command to “keep awake”. One image that got here to my mind is not going to do in any respect. In the old Tom and Jerry cartoons, certainly one of Tom’s strategies for keeping awake was to prop his eyelids open with matchsticks. It failed, after all. The second was to color eyes over his closed eyelids to create a trompe l’oeil. That failed, too.
When it involves God, fake wakefulness is not going to do. The finest Advent liturgies, nonetheless energetic the singing of “Lo! he comes with clouds descending”, cannot outweigh a heart tied solely to the current moment, and focused on the current self. What we’d like is a type of wakefulness which shouldn’t be injurious to our well-being, and which doesn’t crank up our stress levels — in other words, one which enhances our lives as a substitute of diminishing them.
Not for the primary time, I find myself asking tips on how to read this Gospel in the sunshine of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6.34); for I hear the words of Jesus calling us to “take no thought for the morrow”, and I would like to merge this with being at all times “on the watch”. This is where we will turn to Isaiah and Paul for help.
Isaiah explores the connection of God and his people over time. Instead of putting himself on the centre (“What about me, Lord?”), he lays out a pattern of human history. It shouldn’t be cyclical, however it does witness to repeating actions and reactions. Blessing begets forgetfulness, and forgetfulness begets suffering, and suffering begets a turning to the Lord, and turning to the Lord begets blessing. The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible reflects on this pattern through many stories, over long periods of time.
At the moment when Isaiah declares his prophecy, the persons are in an absence-phase. They have called to the Lord during a time when he has distanced himself from them, and from their concerns. Paul, however, addresses Corinthian Christians while their experience of blessing is recent. Between these two, we will splice within the Gospel message, to precise how salvation history, and Christian experience, teach us tips on how to make preparations to receive the Lord in the fitting way.
It is stating the apparent, I do know, but we cannot make the Lord’s Advent occur. Our prayers cannot “summon” the Lord to look, like a genie. Advent repentance could also be a essential condition, however it shouldn’t be a sufficient one. Although prayer, worship, and sacrament, in addition to history, and the authority of the Church, all give the illusion of control to our spiritual lives, an illusion is all that it’s.
Wakefulness shouldn’t be spiritual anxiety (inability to sleep) or spiritual sleep-deprivation. God doesn’t call us to perform negative things; he “doesn’t willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (Lamentations 3.33). There is one other type of wakefulness, though. It could also be an extended time since we’ve got experienced it. We may use one other word to precise it, by calling it “anticipation”.
Instead of the grim exhaustion of early parenthood, we will recall the thrilling excitement of being a small child on Christmas Eve. Advent should feel like that: not a lot a struggle to stay up as a way of mounting excitement while the longed-for moment draws near.
The verse 1 Corinthians 1.8 looks forward to a culmination that’s absolute and final, not the provisional pattern of call and withdrawal which we present in Isaiah. God has spoken his last Word, and the Word is Christ. Like children waiting for Christmas Day, we anticipate our Lord’s coming. No need for matchsticks, or fake-awake eyes. If we love the Master, it’s exciting to await his return.
