The word “Advent” is Latin for “coming,” in this case the coming of the Lord both immediately and at the end of time to bring the Kingdom to its conclusion. In today’s first reading, the prophet Isaiah was obviously worried about the coming of God to Israel. He feared God’s visitation, which seemed to involve severe punishment, earthquakes and other terrors of nature. The prophet asks God to cease being angry and instead visit the people with forgiveness. “Look! Exercise forbearance! No longer hide your face from us! For you are our father, the one who begot us. Have mercy on us, your children. You are our father, we are the clay and you are potter. We are all the work of your hands.”
We might ask today whether realistically can we make our own this prayer dreading divine wrath. If we stop for a moment to think about it, however, we can approach God with our own version of reluctance and negative feelings – regret over careless hearts that have not hoped for the Lord’s coming, and inattention to God’s ongoing action in the world and in our lives. No less than our ancestors, we need conversion. We need to “turn toward God.”
The penitential prayer in Isaiah helps us appreciate Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Mark, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” We can be forgiven for losing a sense of urgency after two thousand years of waiting. It is safe to say that the Advent of the Messiah is not going to come tomorrow or the next day. What then are we to hope for, and be on alert every day?
I suggest that we should not expect a single dramatic appearance of God, but rather to a process, often hidden, that God is overseeing in our world today. It is not a momentary event, but an ongoing reality. The divine process is gradual and has been going on for a long time. Jesus himself did not come in a single moment, but grew into his mission from the Father. As he lived with his disciples and also the others including many women, he introduced the kingdom. The late biblical scholar John Meier states upfront that “‘Kingdom of God’ is misleading to anyone unaware of the biblical background of the phrase. Meier defines kingdom of God: “Kingdom of God is meant to conjure up the dynamic notion of God powerfully ruling over his creation, over his people, and over the history of both.” Watching for the kingdom means being attentive to its signs in the present and believing that these present signs, small as they are, are but preliminary glimpses that will one day come to full realization. Our prayer can be to make us into a people attentive to God acting in the world.