Homilies & Thoughts

Advent arrives like an alarm clock in the dark. The world keeps moving at its usual pace—work and meals, holidays and travel, screens glowing late into the night—yet the Lord gently shakes our shoulder and gives a single, urgent command: “Therefore, stay awake!”

When Jesus speaks of the days of Noah, he does not describe spectacular sins. He speaks of people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Ordinary life. Good things, but lived as if God were unnecessary. People so absorbed in what was immediately in front of them that they never lifted their eyes to what was coming toward them. The flood did not surprise them because it was hidden; it surprised them because they were spiritually asleep.

The throne of our King does not look like a throne. It is a cross planted outside the city, with a crude sign nailed above his head and a handful of people watching while the crowd mocks and walks away. The rulers scoff, the soldiers make jokes, even a dying criminal joins in. It looks like weakness and failure.

Yet this is the moment when the true King of the Universe is revealed. The eternal Son of the Father has emptied himself, born of a woman, obedient even to this shameful death. And precisely here, when every earthly measure says he has lost, he begins to reign. One man sees it. One man, condemned justly by his own admission, looks at the crucified Jesus and recognizes a King. He turns and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

A cathedral on Rome’s Lateran Hill—St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome—bears the name “Mother and Head of all churches in Rome and in the world.” Today the Church celebrates the dedication of that cathedral. Strange, perhaps, to keep a feast for a building. Yet the Church asks us to do so because what we dedicate in stone reveals what God desires to do in us. Walls and doors cannot contain God. He fills heaven and earth. Still, he gives us a place set apart so our scattered hearts can be gathered, our senses focused, our lives reoriented toward him.