Our Lord Jesus Christ comes to us in the flesh. In the flesh he reaches out to us and in the flesh we can reach out to him.
Reality as we live it daily, is very distant from the vision that shapes our dreams. But as Christians, that vision is not mere wishful thinking. Christmas is incarnation. And incarnation is the vision that empowers, the vision that we all need and that restores order.
Advent is a time that reminds us not of something promised, but of the 'Adventus', something that really happened: God entered our human history so that we may not be conquered by history. "Let us go to the mountain of the Lord that He may teach us his ways" (Isaiah). From our down-to-earthliness, we need to climb to the Lord's mountain to have His vision of things and not to remain locked in our vicious circles.
We may ask: "What has the story of Noah's Ark got to do with Advent and with all this? What is the connection between preparation for Christmas and the flood? Why should we think of the unexpected crisis when society around us is gearing up for another season of consumption?"
The Gospel speaks of alienation and seeks a comparison between our times and the days of Noah. On this first Sunday of Advent, there is a sense of the unexpected in the readings proposed, even a feeling of unexpected crisis, particularly in the Gospel and in Paul's letter to the Romans. The comparisons of the "two men in the field" and the "two women at the mill" emphasises the division introduced by Christ's coming. Similar people who do the same task, are actually separated: one joins the kingdom, the other is left out. Many people will once again be left out this Christmas, left homeless, without any secure points of reference in life. Many are out of touch with the way we re-enact the Christmas story. The Bethlehem connection needs to be explained again.
As the Gospel explains, it's the same old story as at the time of Noah, with people eating and drinking and feasting, while life's tsunamis advance slowly but steadily. There is always the unexpected in life. And the worst aspect is not that unforseeable things come our way when least we expect them; but rather that they can take us unaware and find us not strong enough to face them.
The Fathers of the Church in antiquity always spoke of more than one coming of Jesus. The first of these we commemorate with Christmas year in year out. The second is the more important. It happens when we come face to face with Jesus as saviour in our lifetime. It can happen in diverse ways. But it can also fail to materialise.
When Paul in the second reading says: "the time has come", he means the time to stop and think, to stop spinning endlessly, exhausting ourselves on the treadmill of habit. It's time, Paul argues, to "give up all the things we prefer to do under cover of the dark". In life, floods come and can sweep everything away.
We've all had wake-up calls in life, both individually and collectively; calls to make us aware that there is a God who is shaping us through the events of our lives. The less we acknowledge this, the heavier those same events will weigh on us. Because ultimately, it is the very events and experiences we go through in our lifetime that pronounce judgment on us.