Advent II 2009

In past times men have been driven to utter fear and despair over the thought of the Second Coming. Advent used to be a season in which the Judgment, the qualitative nature of Christ’s Second Coming, used to figure significantly. During this season men were urged to consider not merely Christ’s first coming in the flesh at Christmas time, but also his final coming “to judge both the quick and the dead.”

To be sure there is not much use in preaching about a judgment with grim threats or dire consequences. Any good-spirited Christian knows that in the last days men will receive what they desired. By that time they will have decided to be for Jesus Christ or against him. The choice is left up to them, and they will reap the consequences of their deepest desires and habits of the heart.

But there is a sense in which we might take seriously this fact: that the ways and mores of our lives will determine our final destination. We shall find ourselves either near to or distant from the God that made us and came to redeem us. The final Judgment will be merely an eternal act of justice in which we shall receive an eternity of what moved and defined us in this life.

What moves and defines us really can be termed collectively as our “god.” If we have been moved by the things of this earth, by material possessions, by fleshly interests, by money, by power, by ambition or vanity, then we shall find ourselves at a distance from the presence of God. If we have been moved by God, by the love and wisdom that is Jesus Christ, by the perennial presence of the Spirit, then we shall be in the presence of eternal joy and fulfillment.

This Advent let us be determined to think soberly about the choices we have made and continue to make. Let us ask ourselves what moves and defines us. If we find that we have “erred and strayed” from God’s ways, let us repent and amend our lives by the Grace of God. Let us even, perhaps, embrace a bit of that fear that is healthy for the soul’s continued reform. Let us abandon our sinful ways because truly we “dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell,” and because “we have offended God, who is all good and deserving of all our love.”

© W.J. Martin†