Be watchful! Be Alert! (Mark 14)

 

    “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” Mark 14:33

      In Nomine, etc..

     We’ve entered the season of Advent, and the beginning of a new liturgical year. Of course, we experience more than one new beginning every year. There’s the civil New Year that begins on January 1, there’s the school year that begins every August or September, which I suspect every parent of school-age children experiences as the real new year, regardless of the civil or the church calendar. And Orthodox Christians begin their liturgical year on September 1. We remember that in the Old Style calendar, the New Year began on March 25, followed by a week of celebration culminating on April 1, April Fools Day, which we still commemorate, more or less, every year. So we have our choice of new years, every year. We have more than one opportunity, every year, to have a sense of beginning anew, starting fresh, without being attached to one way, and one way only, of experiencing the passing of time. We have three or four new years, each year, to wake us  up, to remind us of the passing of time, to get our attention, to call us out of habit and routine, to become aware of the real situations in which we find ourselves, to become watchful in fact, to be ready for the unexpected, as Our Lord is telling us to do in today’s Gospel.

     As we know, there are two themes in the Advent season, Incarnation and the Second Coming. The Second Coming is called in the New Testament the Parousia, which means presence or arrival. Our Lord is telling us to be aware of his presence, of his continuous presence and future arrival. The 24th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which has a longer version of what we hear today in Mark’s Gospel,  is about signs of the end of the age, persecution to come, sacrilege to be suffered, false prophets and false messiahs to be avoided, and about the coming of the Son of Man, whose angels will gather his elect from the four winds. These are alarming signs and stern warnings. 

     It seems to me that, in telling us to keep awake, Our Lord is telling us not so much to be looking forward, anxiously or otherwise, to an unpredictable future event, as he is telling us to pay attention to present reality. “You do not know when the time will come,” is a way of saying, “You do not know when you will see the real nature of things; you do not know when the veil of routine, of ordinary daily life will fall away and you will see life, the world, in all their glory!” We have glimpses of this when we mark new year commemorations, and for a moment we see things afresh, and we begin again, and then the veil of routine returns. Our Lord refers to this in Matthew’s version of today’s Gospel, when he recounts the story of Noah’s Flood. Our Lord says, “Before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Now the surface meaning of this passage is clear; it is a description of a catastrophic event of a  kind we know well, and of heedless people being swept away in a natural disaster. It is a description of the kind of thing that happens when we are not watchful. But there is more to this passage than its literal natural meaning.

    The passage does not have to mean only that a lot of heedless people were swept away and drowned. It can mean that the flood, that is, the power and presence of God, can sweep through the routines of life and clear them away, so that what is left is a new perception of life and the world. The Noah story is about just that, clearing away all that blocks our perception of the world as God sees it, and as God means us to see it. The world after Noah is a new Eden.  Our Lord calls this “the coming of the Son of Man.” Our Zen Buddhist friends call this “the falling away of body and mind,” that is, the falling away of all that blocks our perception of reality. And it is reality, divine reality in the world, that Our Lord wants us to wake up to.

     We are awake when we do not take the routines of life to be the whole of life. We are awake when we do not take superficial, partial explanations of reality for the whole of it. We are awake when we pay attention to Our Lord.

    So let us take the  opportunity given us by the arrival of this new church year, another new beginning, to shake off the slumber of routine, to prepare for the experience of reality as it truly is, and to be awake to the arrival at any time, of the coming of the Son of Man.

     “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” (29.XI.20 Adv.)