I wonder if you can recall your primary school days? Try and remember what happened when you were young and the teacher announced that she was just going to step out of the class for a few minutes. She would normally say something like: Now class, I’m going down the hall to the office to make a call. While I am gone I expect you to maintain silence, behave properly and do the few sums on the blackboard; I’ll be right back. And I am sure you can remember what happened as soon as she walked out the door. When the teacher is away, there is a test of character, a test that many people fail. In my school days I remember vividly that all hell broke loose. Some kids worked or tried to while others made paper planes and other missiles and attacked others with them; some wandered around from desk to desk talking to one here, poking another there and generally being a nuisance. Sometimes the whole affair got so organised and one or two boys would stand sentry near the door, listening for the teacher’s return, while their friends ransacked the room, wrote notes on the board, or did something mischievous to one of the teacher’s books or chair. If you’ve watched Whoopi Goldberg’s movie Sister Act, then you know what students can really get up to if they put their evil minds together armed with a tube of superglue. And it’s not just the children; that’s the way human beings behave. If you put a caveat onto anything, you simply increase its desirability. If God had not forbidden Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, I suspect we would still be in paradise. The fact that the children were told to behave seems to act as a catalyst for them to misbehave.
Well, friends, right now the teacher is away and we are living between times: in the time between Christ’s first coming — as a baby long ago in Bethlehem — and his second coming as King and Judge. And the question that our Gospel lesson poses for us today, while we are in this state, is quite simple: are we going to pass the test set for us by our heavenly teacher’s absence or are we going to fail just like many of us did back when we were in school? The way I see it is that most of the New Testament is concerned with the problem of God’s absence. When Jesus was here with us in the flesh, that was one thing; but in his absence, in the time between his first Advent and the next: How is your discipleship? How well are you doing in your class homework? Relationships between us and God tend to be fine when we are here in the church worshipping him, eating the bread, drinking the wine, touching and tasting God’s goodness and experiencing his near presence. But what about later, when we walk out of that door and we are back in the secular world? What then? Isn’t it a little bit like it was back in our school days? Some can be trusted to do their work but some cannot. What amazes me is God’s continued love and faith in us considering how badly we have behaved. Yet, even so, God has put us in the classroom, each with our own work to do, and all he asks of us is to do our bit and be alert for his Son’s return. Jesus urges us toward a kind of awareness in which, whatever else we are doing, even in resting or sleeping, some part of us remains alert and pays attention to what is unfolding and reflects on what it means. Jesus is talking here about cultivating the habit of keeping vigil like those two boys at the classroom door. He is describing a kind of awareness and attention in which we learn not to rely primarily on what we can see — after all, when he comes again the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light — but to turn to the wisdom of the other senses, to discern what they can tell us about what is unfolding in the world around us. Christ is coming again and we need him to come quickly because too many in his class have become unruly.
But, while we long for his return, as Israel longed for his coming in the Old Testament narratives, while we long for the time when the classroom will be a place of silent study and peace; for the time when all things will be finally straightened out, the time when the wicked will perish and the faithful receive their reward, while we long for this time, we need not be too much concerned about just when it will happen. We need not worry because in the meantime, we have our work to do and we can trust God to honour that work and to keep his promise to be merciful and kind to those who have lived by faith in him. The teacher will come, and the faithful and the unfaithful alike will see him coming: they will see him coming with his angels in the clouds with great power and glory and the angels will be sent out to gather his elect from the four corners of the earth. And there will be justice and there will be peace as he separates the sheep from the goats — a peace greater than that which came when our earthly school teachers returned to their classes; a justice more just than that which was meted out to those caught unexpectedly when the teacher opened the classroom door to behold the mayhem. This is our hope, this is our Christian faith. And at this time of Advent, this is the time in which we need to prove to our teacher that we can be trusted to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit those in prison and show love to our neighbours without turning the class into a circus, and wait patiently for his return. Amen.