Hurry Up and Wait!: Hope
Advent is the Season of Waiting
Mark: 13:24-37
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. Dec. 3rd, 2023
I noticed this year that Walmart had Christmas decorations up before Halloween. The Christmas music began to blare through store speakers disconcertingly early. Even downtown got lights on as soon as Halloween was over with. We like to rush to Christmas. We want to rush to caroling, presents, Santa, family, chestnuts roasting on an open fire and Jack Frost nibbling at your nose. But before Christmas we have Advent. A time for waiting.
I enjoy Advent because Advent is the season of our lives. It is the time we devote to waiting for the coming of the King. We look back at how the prophets, Joseph, and Mary waited for Jesus. And when looking back we look to ourselves, who also wait for the coming of Jesus. We are the ones who are to keep awake. We are the ones who are to wait in expectant hope. Advent calls us to take seriously this waiting, this period of history, as we wait for the end to come.
Appropriately, then, our first gospel reading concerns waiting for the end. Though it may not seem very Christmas-y itself. Linus is probably not reading Mark chapter 13 at the end of a Christmas special. But Jesus has been walking among the Temple with his disciples, and his friends marvel at the structure. Jesus uses the occasion to teach them about the end. That the day is coming when not one stone will be on top of another. And they will have to be ready.
“Beware,” he says, “keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.” Jesus is insistent on this point, “Therefore keep awake. … And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” We may need to fall asleep for Santa to arrive, but we are expected to keep awake for Jesus to arrive. When he’s so insistent it must be important. But what does this wakefulness mean? What does it mean to keep alert? Surely he does not mean for us literally to stay awake, our eyes open, keeping vigil? What does the alertness, the wakefulness, Jesus calls us to here look like?
Jesus’ call to keep alert reminds me of his praying in Gethsemane. After the last supper with his disciples Jesus heads out with Peter, James, and John to a garden to pray. “My soul is very sorrowful,” Jesus says, “Even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” He goes out to pray. He asks that the cup be taken from him, if it is his Father’s will. He sweats blood. He knows what is coming. He is wracked with anxiety and fear. But when he returns to his disciples he finds them sleeping. “Simon,” he asks, “are you sleeping? could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak.”
He goes to pray again. And when he returns the disciples are once again asleep. A third time he goes to pray, and returns to find them asleep! “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.” Judas arrives, Jesus is taken.
I don’t think it’s an idle detail that in Jesus’ parable of the doorkeeper he says, “you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn.” That Maundy Thursday Jesus had his last supper with his disciples in the evening, was betrayed at midnight, was denied by Peter at the cockcrow, and delivered to Pilate at dawn. The wakefulness Jesus expects of us is analogous to the wakefulness Jesus expected of Peter, James, and John in the garden. And the wakefulness Jesus knew Peter would not have in the courtyard as the rooster crowed.
That wakefulness, that vigilance, is shown in two ways.
The first is that we remain hopeful. Peter is prepared to die for Jesus until Jesus refuses to fight back. Then despair overcomes him and he denies his Lord. The disciples flee the hour when they were called to be awake. They did not see that the cross was not a defeat but a triumph. They lacked hope. But we are called to remain hopeful. To know that we are in the time of God’s patience, the God who regards a day as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. That hope that we have means we should regard each day as the end. Each moment as a moment where Christ may return. And to be ready for that. Because that is our hopeful expectation. Not forgetting that hope.
The second is that we are to remain in prayer. What does Jesus expect Peter, James, and John to do as he prays in the garden? They are to pray as well. But they cannot. They are overcome by sleepiness. They shirk their duties and do not keep vigil. We are called to keep vigil. We are to be a people of prayer. Who pray for ourselves, pray for our friends, our family, our world. We are to hold up all things in prayer as we keep watch. Waiting for that day when “thy kingdom comes, thy will is done, on earth as in heaven.” And our prayers are ultimately fulfilled.
Jesus thinks it is of the utmost importance that we stay awake. How do we stay awake? Through hope and prayer. Through prayerful hope. The hope of knowing Christ will return and could return this very second. The discipline of prayer where God makes himself known to us in our hearts, and by which we lift up the concerns of our world. If we want to keep a holy Advent, prayer and hope are the ways to start.