1st Sunday Advent B - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008 

I can go to the Supermarket and find there about thirty different breakfast foods to choose from.  I need a new car, and there are thirty different models to choose from.  I can live a whole day, a whole week, a whole month, and my life is full of endless alternatives from which I can choose.  Some people see that boundless possibility for choice as one of the wonderful things about life in a capitalist democracy.  

My take on that is that, despite the plethora of possibilities, a lot of people rarely make real, personal choices.  What we buy, what we choose to do, even how we choose to think, are for so many, simply a programmed compliance to: the spiel of the advertising industry or the emphases of the media, public opinion, the culture around us, or simply our ingrained habits.  Choices are seemingly unlimited, but so many are totally insignificant.  Too many people don’t choose to live life – they are simply carried along by it.

But we can live life.  The myriad details of our lives can have eternal significance.  All these things we choose, all these things we do, can be conscious and deliberate expressions of something deeper.  They can be expressions of love, acts of responsibility.  They can be choices for life, for justice, for care and compassion – practical options building the Kingdom of God.

As followers of Jesus, he wants us to live life, to step onboard the Kingdom – to realise how every response we make, in the unfolding detail of our lives, can reverberate into eternity.  The simplest of them can be expressions of faith, of hope, of love.  The simplest things can enlarge our hearts, mould who we are, and give practical shape to our eventual eternal destiny.  But, as someone said – one of the early Greek philosophers, I think – the unreflected life is a wasted life.

Jesus put it more positively in today’s Gospel: Stay awake!  Stay awake!  Keep your eyes open! Don’t live in a dream! Don’t drift! Don’t get distracted! See the potential there in every moment of your day.  See the other dimension, the deeper dimension, to everything you do.  Let everything you do contribute to the building of God’s Kingdom, the “hastening”, as it were, the eventual revealing of the currently hidden presence of the Son of Man.