Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44.

This Gospel is characterized by its ample reporting of Jesus' teachings -- the famous sermons,
such as the Sermon on the Mount -- and its attention to the relationship between the Law and
Gospel (the Gospel is the "New Law"). It is also considered the most "ecclesiastical" Gospel
because of its account of the primacy of Peter and because of its use of the term "Church,"
which is not encountered in the other Gospels.

The statement that stands out among all others in this Gospel of the First Sunday of Advent is
"Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. […] So too, you also
must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come." We ask
ourselves why God would keep hidden something so important as the hour of his coming,
which, for each of us, coincides with the hour of death.

The traditional answer is: "So that we will be vigilant, each one of us supposing that it will
happen in his days" (St. Ephrem the Syrian). But the principal reason is that God knows us; he
knows what terrible anxiety it would be for us to know beforehand the exact hour and to await
its slow, inexorable coming. It is that which causes the most fear in regard to certain illnesses.

Today there are more people that die of unforeseen heart problems than those who die of
incurable illnesses. But the latter cause more fear because they seem to take away the
uncertainty that allows us to hope.

The uncertainty of the hour should not cause us to be careless but to be vigilant. If the liturgical
year is at its start, the civil year is at its end. This is an optimal occasion for a sapiential
reflection on the meaning of our existence. In autumn, nature itself invites us to reflect on time
that passes. That which the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti said of the soldiers in the trenches on the
Carso front in the First World War holds for all men: "They are on the trees as leaves in
autumn." They are ready to fall at any moment. "Time passes," said our Dante Alighieri, "and
man pays no attention."

An ancient philosopher expressed this fundamental experience with a celebrated phrase:

"Everything is in flux." Life is like a television screen. The screen is a kind of palimpsest, one
program follows and erases the previous one. The screen is the same but the images change.
This is how it is with us: The world remains, but we come and go, one after the other. Of all the
names, the faces, the news that fills the papers and television today -- of me, of you, of all of us
-- what will remain in a few years or a decade? Nothing of nothing. Man is nothing but "a design
created by a wave on the sand, which the next wave will wash away."

Let us see what faith has to tell us about this fact that everything passes. "Yet the world and its
enticement are passing away. But whoever does the will of God remains forever" (1 John 2:17).
There is someone who does not pass, God, and there is also a way for us not to completely
disappear: Do God's will, that is, believe and follow God. In this life we are like a raft carried
along by the current of a roaring river headed for the open sea, from which there is no return.

At a certain point the raft comes near to the bank. It is now or never and you leap onto the shore.
What a relief when you feel the rock under your feet! This is the sensation often felt by those
who come to the faith. We might recall at the end of this reflection the words left by St. Teresa
of Avila as a kind of spiritual testament: "Let nothing disturb you, nothing frighten you. All
things are passing. God alone remains."