1st Sunday in Advent 2024 December 3, 2023

Fr. Rick’s Two-Minute Homily for the 1st Sunday in Advent 2024
December 3, 2023, Mark 13:33-37
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120323.cfm

Here He Comes.

Do you remember people camping outside Walmart the night before Black Friday? Do you remember all the lines and the mad rush when the doors opened?

Have you ever waited in the hospital waiting room for the news of a sick relative undergoing an operation? Then there’s the phone call, waiting for the safe arrival of a loved one after a long journey.
In the gospel, Jesus encourages us to keep alert and awake because He is coming. We also hear in today’s Preface to “watch for that day, hoping that the salvation promised us will be ours when Christ our Lord comes in glory.”

We may think we have to wait until the end of time. But Jesus is coming again again and again. You never know when He will come, like the hospital volunteer tutor who was asked to visit a fifth grader. No one warned her that the boy had been badly burned and was in great pain.

Upset at the site of his scars, she stammered as she told him, “Your school has sent me to help you with nouns and verbs.”1. She left after the lesson, feeling that she hadn’t accomplished much at all.
But the next day, a nurse asked her, “What did you do to that boy?”
The teacher, stricken, began to apologize.
“No, no,” said the nurse.

“You don’t understand. We have been very worried about him; his whole attitude has changed.

“He is fighting back, responding to treatment. It’s as though he decided to live.”

Two weeks later, the boy explained that he had lost hope until the teacher arrived. Then, everything changed when he came to a simple realization.

He said simply: “They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?”
Jesus is amazing. A hospital volunteer going about her daily routine can turn your life around. We just heard in the gospel about a man traveling abroad who leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work to do.

The hospital tutor thought she had failed miserably. With Jesus, the end is never what we expect it to be.

Watch, therefore: you don’t know when the Lord of the house is coming.

11 MLA: “December 3, 2017: ‘Rouse Your Power And Come To Save Us!’.” Insert Name of Site in Italics. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2017 https://www.osv.com/OSVNewsweekly/Faith/Article/TabId/720/ArtMID/13628/ArticleID.

or .