Each year during Advent, we have some pretty colorful readings, as you have probably noticed before: The prophecies of doom and restoration around the Exile in Babylon, Jesus announcing to his disciples his return and the end of the world, the final judgment. Later in Advent, we also hear about John the Baptist’s powerful predication in the wilderness, and then even later we hear the angels announcing Jesus’s birth to Joseph and Mary. It can be a bit overwhelming! This year though, in the midst of that, we will also hear almost every week a passage from the Epistle to the Romans which is one of the most doctrinal of Paul’s Epistles, one of the most dispassionate: It is known as the Epistle where Paul states in the most developed way his theology of salvation. You may also already know that it is because of the Epistle, so to speak, that we had the Reformation. It was Luther’s favorite, where he discovered that, contrarily to what was taught in the Catholic Church at the time, salvation could not come from our good works, but only from faith in Jesus-Christ. This doctrine has been quite misunderstood since then and for this reason it is good we come back to Romans on the regular basis, which is what we are going to do during this season.
It is interesting to realize that the doctrine of Paul that has come to be presented by Luther as the doctrine of “the justification by faith” was born from Luther’s personal anxieties. Today in our readings, and especially in the Gospel, we have a taste of what the final judgment will be like and very much aware of his own shortcomings, Luther, a monk at the time, used to be terrified about this very judgment. He was convinced that, no matter how hard he tried, he would never be good enough to be worthy of Christ and of his coming kingdom. It’s only on meditating on the Epistle to the Romans that he ended up understanding that indeed there was nothing he could DO, but instead he just had to accept the gift of salvation as presented by Paul in his Epistle: “For all alike have sinned and are deprived of the divine glory; and all are justified by God’s free grace alone, through his act of liberation in the person of Jesus–Christ” (Chapter 3:23). Now the problem with that, at least with the way the doctrine was presented, is that it had made some Christians quite lazy with the passing of time: We cannot save ourselves, there is actually nothing we can do, therefore we just need to believe, to confess Christ. Paul though already warned his readers many times against this pitfall: using our faith as an excuse for sin: Because there is nothing we can do, then let’s do nothing. On the other way around Paul says, and that’s where we are in our readings today, because we know the kingdom of Christ is coming, we have to live according to this kingdom right now, to the best of our abilities: “Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (13:12b).
Now how can we understand that? It does not save us to do good works, but we have to do them because they are part of our faith, they are part of our acceptance of the salvation offered by Christ. To use a familiar image, I would say that it’s a little bit like when you are invited to a party. The invitation only depends on the good will of your host, you cannot make them invite you (at least that’s usually the way it goes!), all you can do is say “yes”. And yet, it is not enough to say “yes”, it’s actually nothing to say yes if you don’t get dressed, leave your house and go to the party, and it’s nice to bring a gift, or something to share. I think this is also the way it goes with our invitation to share in Christ’s kingdom. Indeed there is nothing we can do but accept, yet our response is not contained in our words only but also, and mainly, in our actions. This is with our whole life that we respond to Christ’s invitation, getting ready for the party if you will, or in Paul’s words again, living right now as if we were in the kingdom, laying aside the works of darkness and putting on the armor of light. Another expression Paul likes to use is to live according to the Spirit instead of living according to the flesh. The flesh for Paul isn’t the body or isn’t the body only, when he talks about the desire of the flesh as he does in our reading today (v.14), Paul does not point out only to greed or sexual sins. The flesh encompasses all that is opposed to the spirit of God. When we live according to the flesh, on top of indulging ourselves “in drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness”, we live in selfishness, “quarreling and jealousy” as mentioned in verse 13. But in the light of the kingdom we are invited to, we are to dress accordingly for the party. Our virtues will be our armor of light.
One of the things I would like to point out and I think can be really useful for us today is to realize that we are meant to live according to what is to come. When we live as a Christian, our future conditions our present existence. And it is so different from what we use to think when we live in the world or according to the flesh (to use Paul’s words): We think that our past conditions our present and that we are prisoners of these circumstances. I was talking to a friend this week who was quite depressed and this was actually his way of seeing things: It will never change because of what happened to me in my childhood, because of trauma. I will never be able to live this life as I should, I will never be able to know how to love right. Well, he wasn’t completely wrong. We will always have to deal with our own story and the bad things that happened to us. We will never know how to live and how to love as we should. And yet, as Christians we believe that our future is more important than our past. We believe it does not matter so much who we have been, what matters is who we will become, and so we don’t live in regret, bitterness and despair. During the season of Advent, we remember the first coming of Christ in Jesus of Nazareth, but we also anticipate the return of Christ and the establishment of his kingdom, where we will be made new creatures, from darkness to light. We are called by our future, instead of being weighted by our past and this should be for us a continual source of joy and hope and increase our desire for transformation. And this is why Paul asks the church in Rome “to wake up from sleep”. Far from making us lazy, the belief that we have been justified by Christ, saved and accepted, should motivate us to offer our very best on a daily basis instead of dulling our senses in licentiousness or occupying ourselves with petty matters in quarrels (to quote Paul again!)
This theme of “waking up” or “watching” is essential to Matthew’s Gospel and as we open the Gospel according to Matthew for the first time in this new liturgical year, this is also the first thing we hear in Jesus’s words: “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (v.41) in the same way than the owner of the house if “he had known in what part of the night the thief was coming“, “He would have stayed awake” (v.43). When asked about the final judgment, Jesus says very little to his disciples, except that it will take them by surprise, like a flood or a thief, if they aren’t ready, if they fall asleep in their sin or would it be only in their daily tasks. Yet all Jesus does in Matthew’s Gospel is to teach about the kingdom, so we can be prepared, so we can start living according to Christ’s rule in the world, or in Paul’s words, we live “according to the Spirit instead of the flesh”, or we “turn from darkness towards the light” which is exactly what this season of Advent invites us to do. If you knew for sure, if you believed with all your heart that the kingdom of Christ is coming and coming soon, what is it that you would start to do right now?