NOTE: Throughout the Advent season, we’ll post a reflection on the readings for the upcoming Sunday in Advent just a few days before so individuals and groups can reflect in anticipation or incorporate it into their meetings, homilies, etc. The reflection will be available on our homepage through the weekend and then archived on our Advent 2025 webpage.
The reflection below is written by Flora x. Tang for this year’s Advent reflection booklet, “Entering the night of peace.” The booklet is still available for purchase at this link as an immediate download for your tablet or e-reader for $4.00.
By Flora x. Tang
Isaiah 2:1-5 | Romans 13:11-14 | Matthew 24:37-44
Our readings from the first Sunday of Advent impart to us a sense of rushed urgency. Therefore, stay awake! Christ’s return and judgment could occur any minute, writes the Gospel of Matthew. The night is advanced, the day is at hand, writes the Book of Romans.
Our world today, especially around this time of the year, also imparts to us much anxiety-inducing urgency. Online and printed signage for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas season sales—often featuring the words, “Sale ends today!!” or “Only 48 hours left!!”— remind us to make that big purchase today and not tomorrow. Work project and final project deadlines also redefine the penultimate months of the year as times of great urgency. We are told to keep working during every waking hour to meet yet another deadline and to maximize our productivity before the holiday season. Urgency is a sales tactic. Urgency is a strategy of the individualistic and capitalistic world around us to get us to do more, to produce more, and to purchase more, right now. For me at least, this urgency that the world gives us is one that produces much anxiety.
The urgency that we hear from today’s readings at the beginning of this Advent season, however, is distinctly different from the urgency that the world imparts upon us. The urgency of Christ’s apocalyptic message— “the day is at hand”— promises the impending coming of the reign of God that will shake up the earth. The urgent promise of the second coming of God is both a threat for the powerful and a hope for those who are suffering: the way things are today in the world will not be the way things will be in God’s reign of peace. We, as Christ’s followers, must remain vigilant and urgently prepare ourselves for—and help establish—this very Kingdom of God.
Christ’s urgency is therefore the opposite of the self-serving urgency that today’s “grind culture” offers us. Rather, the urgency and hope of the Advent season is a call to pray for others and love our neighbors with great urgency in a time of great uncertainty in our world. We do not know when God’s second coming would be, our gospel reminds us. But even more immediately, we also do not know what will happen next in our families, in our country, or in our world. We do not when it would be too late for us to prevent yet another tragedy, war, authoritarian regime rise, or humanitarian crisis in the world. Amid these ongoing and impending crises in our world, Christ calls us during this season of Advent to love and to build peace with radical urgency, and to continue to stay awake and not look away from those who are suffering.
Last year, I watched a video of US-based anti-war activists, young and old, linking arms and holding hands as they clung onto a large ship that carried a shipment of weapons to be delivered from the US to Israel to be used for killing and destruction in Gaza. The peacebuilders clung their bodies onto the boat for hours to prevent the boat from leaving the dock. For they knew that the shipment of one fewer boatload of weapons—or perhaps even a delayed shipment— means the possibility perhaps one more life would be spared.
These peacebuilders embody the same urgency of saving lives, of resisting war, and of feeding the hungry in which our readings today call us all to participate. Works of mercy and acts of peacebuilding, while they should be part of our long-term aspirations, are not actions that can be delayed until tomorrow. Because people are dying of war today and weapons continue to be shipped abroad today and every day. We, like the activists who clung onto the boat to prevent its departure, must too take risks and embody the urgency of “beating our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks,” as today’s reading from Isaiah calls us all to work toward.
In our already anxious-inducing, deadline-driven world, how might Christ’s message of urgency offer us not additional burdens to bear, but a different hope upon which to set our eyes?
How can we resist the self-serving urgency of capitalism and productivity this Advent season? Perhaps we can choose to take time to rest and to breathe, and to remind ourselves that productivity isn’t everything.
On the other hand, how can we embrace the urgency of God’s peacebuilding work on earth? How can we answer our call of urgently loving others and helping those in need stay alive? What would it look like if we tried to save lives, to prevent the shipment of destructive weapons, to fight for nonviolence, to love our families, and to protect the earth with such urgency as if “the day is at hand”?
>> For more Advent resources and reflections, click here.
Peace my friends
Flora, I love this line:
“In our already anxious-inducing, deadline-driven world, how might Christ’s message of urgency offer us not additional burdens to bear, but a different hope upon which to set our eyes? “
What is “anxious-inducing” in my mind is the Anti-Christ will proceed the second coming. Here is what to watch out for:
The Anti-Christ will:
Appeals to peace, unity, prosperity but on terms that detach people from God.
Uses partial truths to mask deeper distortions.
Ideologies or leaders that present themselves as the ultimate moral authority.
Worship of technology, nation, or a person as the highest good.
Pressure to abandon the basic Christian way
Not necessarily violent persecution
Redefining basic moral teachings as hateful or out-of-date.
A spirit of lawlessness
From 2 Thessalonians: A mindset that rejects any high authority.
False prophets & counterfeit spirituality
Division and hatred masquerading as righteousness
Sowing division, polarization, and suspicion
Encourages Christians to turn on one another.
Cynicism toward all institutions and the idea that nothing is trustworthy.
Demands for absolute loyalty.
Attempts to override conscience or moral principles.
From Pope Benedict XVI:
“The Antichrist is ultimately a lie, a lie about God and a lie about humanity.”
From Pope Francis:
“Wherever there is spiritual worldliness, the Antichrist is already at work.”
Or I could be wrong.