KAIROS

1st Sunday of Advent
Mk 13:33-37

Today is the First Sunday Advent. It is New Year in the Church. Happy New Year!

But the choice to make this New Liturgical Year truly happy is yours to make. Choose to make this New Liturgical Year really happy, really blest, really grace-filled by living through it and living by it. Live it! Celebrate every moment. Savor every grace. Benefit lavishly from all the sacraments. Ponder on the God’s Word each day. God gives us every means to make the liturgical year overflow with His blessings. But to use it or not depends totally on us. Use it and make this New Year truly happy.

As the Church begins another year, the first four weeks carry the theme of waiting. I find this rather interesting, do you not? Why not start the year with the main event immediately? Why not begin with the Birth of the Lord at once? After all, is it not the Birth of the Lord that determines the start of the present Common Era? So, why start the year with a period of waiting? And four weeks of waiting! What can you say?

We begin the Church’s New Year with a period of waiting because waiting is very important. The best things in life normally come after a period of waiting. Rushing and forcing yield to blunders and even tragedies. A new human life needs nine months inside a human womb. Relationships are stronger when time-tested. Fruits are best when picked ripen from their trees, vines or bushes. Victory is sweetest when achieved by patient endurance. Everything in life needs some period of waiting. Everything, including our redemption from sin and death.

While we commonly associate Advent with our waiting for the Lord’s coming, it may do us well to reflect on Advent also as the Lord’s waiting for His arrival. He too needed to wait before He was born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. He waits each day to give Himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. And He continues waiting when the Father will tell Him, “It’s time, My Son. Your Second Coming has come. Go and wield the sickle. Gather the harvest of the Kingdom.”

Waiting is also very important even to the Lord. He is ever patient with us. He is unlike the elder brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son; He waits with the Father for us to come to our senses, for us to come home, and jump with joy with the idea of throwing a lavish party at our return. He compares our faith with a mustard seed that, though smallest, can grow into the biggest of shrubs. He does not force Himself on us as He patiently invites us to belong to His Kingdom. He waits for us. He waits for the right time. He waits for the time of grace, the kairos. That is why every time for the Lord is a time of grace.

But as He waits for the kairos, the time of grace, the Lord is not idle. He continues showering us with expressions of His amazing love for us. He cares for us even as He waits for us. Not a few of us can say that the Lord keeps on making a way for us where there is no way. Daily He prepares a banquet for us in the Eucharist to nourish us in our journey unto our final rendezvous with Him. He never tires in forgiving us from every sin we confess to Him through the Sacrament. He works for us, works through us, and works in us by His Word and Sacraments. He supplies us with every means to keep us vigilant and prepared when at last He comes again. In a word, the Lord is not idle even as He waits. Jesus is busy waiting for His Second Coming. He is busy loving us.

How about us? How do we wait for the Lord? How do we wait not only for His Second Coming but also for His coming into our life each day? Are we idle as we wait so that no matter how we much wait for His Second Coming, we will still be caught surprised by His sudden arrival? Idleness is a cousin of slumber and a mother of many sins.

We begin another liturgical year. As always, we start it with the Advent Season. However, the main event is yet four weeks away, when we commemorate the Lord’s Birth. Or the main event perhaps is who-knows-how-many-years away, when the Lord comes at the end of the world. Meanwhile the perennial theme of our life is “Waiting”. But ours, as it is with the Lord’s, is not idle waiting. We wait for the Lord’s coming as the Lord waits for His arrival: laboring as He labors for the Kingdom, loving as He loves. The love of the Lord is at work in and through us as we wait for His coming: we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the homeless, nurse the sick, visit the imprisoned, reconcile with the enemy, do corporal works of mercy even as we strive to grow in holiness.

Advent is not only a matter of us waiting for the Lord; it is also a matter of the Lord waiting for us. But between His first coming and His final return, we meet the Lord in the Eucharist and in one another even as we wait for Him. When we meet Him in the Eucharist and in one another and not stand idle but allow His love to work in and through us, it is a time of grace. It is kairos. That is what Christmas is all about, is it not? A time of grace-made-flesh: kairos. And it is kairos that makes every liturgical year happy and blest.