REPENT! THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS NOW!
We encounter John the Baptist and his message of repentance on this second Sunday of Advent. It is human nature to procrastinate and delay repenting because the second coming of Christ seems to be a far-off event. St. Augustine, the penultimate procrastinator in regard to repentance, is quoted praying to God, “”Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” John the Baptist is saying, “Don’t procrastinate. The time for repentance is now!” Why?
In the hymn, “Gather Us In”, the fourth verse begins, “Not in the dark of buildings confining, not in some heaven light years away, but here in this space new light is shining; now is the Kingdom, now is the day!” We often think of the Kingdom of God as some place in a galaxy far, far away. Quite to the contrary, in the Gospels, Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is all around us. Though our physical eyesight cannot perceive it, by faith, we know that the Kingdom of God is over, around and through us, NOW! We are just unaware of it or choose to prevent ourselves from seeing it. St. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, writes that as our health declines and we get closer to death “we look not to what is seen but to what is unseen; for what is seen is transitory, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Cor 4:18). The Kingdom of God is here, right now! This is why in last week’s Gospel, Jesus us tells us, “Be watchful! Be alert!”
The fact that the Kingdom of God is present in the here and now is a hard truth to grasp. As people subject to living in chronological time, our minds find it difficult to think of future events already happening in the present. As St. Peter writes in his second letter, “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.” The “time” of God’s Kingdom is not subject to the rule of years, days, minutes, and seconds in which we live. John the Baptist calls us to repent because the future is happening now. May our Advent be one in which we sharpen our awareness, repent of that which encumbers us, and live fully in the presence of God’s Kingdom.
