Purple Milk for Advent?

“Purple Milk for Advent?” by Brian Flanagan

This Sunday the Church celebrates the Second Sunday of Advent.  We all know Advent, the Liturgical Season leading up to Christmas where the priest wears purple and we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem right? Well, not exactly.  That’s one focus of Advent, but the first couple of weeks of this season actually have a different focus entirely.

Early Advent focuses on the second coming of Christ at the end of time.  It asks the question, if Jesus walked through the door right now, would you be ready to meet him?  My friend’s grandmother used to ask him when he fought with his brother, “Is that what you want to be doing when Jesus comes back?” Whether it’s at the end of time or at the moment of our own death, one day we’re going to finally “meet our maker”.  It’s worth taking some time to think about being ready for that.

My personal favorite Advent related scripture passage is 1 Thessalonians 5:2 “…the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night”.  This is because in college some of my Catholic roommates and I decided to play some “Advent pranks” on a group of Catholic guys who lived in another house.  We snuck into their house in the middle of the night and dyed their milk purple for Advent.  We then wrote “1 Thessalonians 5:2” on their kitchen table in ketchup.

This was a fun reminder for them (and for us) that we don’t know the day or the hour that Jesus is going to come, and we need to live our whole lives in such a way that we’ll be ready when he does.  There have been many predictions of the end of the world throughout human history.  The Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 was probably the most recent widely known prediction.  Yet we’re still here.  That moment will come “like a thief at night”, perhaps when we least expect it.

John the Baptist made his whole life about preparing others to meet Christ.  In the Gospel from the Second Sunday of Advent, we hear John crying out “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”  He then tells the Pharisees and Sadducees (the holy rollers of the time) that their repentance needs to come from the hearts and that they need to “produce good fruit as evidence of [their] repentance.”

If John the Baptist were having this conversation with us today instead of those Pharisees, he might ask, “How are you “bearing fruit” in your life? Does your faith have an impact on the way you live day to day, or do you just go through the motions of being Catholic?  What sins in your life are holding you back from being closer to God?  How do you love, give, and sacrifice for others?”  John uses the image of an ax at the root of the trees, ready to cut down the trees that don’t bear good fruit.  We don’t want to be among those trees!

In other words, the first part of Advent is all about staying focused on heaven.  Jesus wants us to live our lives here on earth as a preparation for eternal life with him in heaven.  The Church gives us these readings as a bit of a wake-up call and a reality check so we can ask ourselves how well we are preparing.

On a smaller scale, we need to be prepared for all the ways that Christ comes to us each day; in the people we meet, in prayer, in blessings we receive, and certainly in the Sacraments.  If we listen to John the Baptist’s call to “Prepare the way of the Lord” in our lives and hearts, we’ll not only be ready to meet Jesus in all the little ways he comes to us today, but we’ll be ready to meet him when he comes in glory.