The Surprise of Expectation
Julián Carrón - “How great is the thought that truly nothing is due to us. Has anyone promised us anything? Then why do we wait?” What a yearning Pavese must have felt to write this sentence in his Diary. It was the surprise of expectation emerging within him, unstoppable! Exactly like us.
We cannot avoid this waiting. It speaks of our nature as men and women who await fulfillment, the fullness of life. More or less consciously, each of us waits for our own person to be fully realized, to be happy. It is the awareness of this waiting that makes the time we begin today—Advent—intelligible. It is this expectation sticking to us that prevents us from perceiving this time as a mere ritual that, deep down, has nothing to do with us. Only by noticing how often we catch ourselves waiting, like Pavese, can we perceive the season of Advent as pertinent to our lives.
If this expectation is constitutive of every human being, it is easy to imagine how the people of Israel, who had seen God at work, were seized by an even more powerful expectation. God, in fact, had taken the initiative with them. This surprising gesture had reawakened an even more impressive expectation, because they saw at their side the One who wanted to respond to it. Those marked by this expectation are described by the prophet Isaiah in the first reading as a “mountain” that draws everyone who awaits the fulfillment of their own expectation.
“In days to come, the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it [...]: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. [...] O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
Although God's initiative had reawakened expectation, Jesus compares the time of His coming to the days before the flood, when men “were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” The temptation to settle, without even noticing it, is always lurking. We realize that we always need someone to reawaken this expectation.
Jesus came and continues to come to shake us from sleep, from distraction, from settling for less. And He invites us to be vigilant: “Stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
The master of the house is not a man out to catch us red-handed, but one who urges us not to let our house be broken into. His face is not that of a “boss,” but of a Father and a Friend. As the prophet Isaiah says: “O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (Is 64:8).
How can we be vigilant, we who are constantly losing our grip? Waiting is inseparable from coming. Without awareness of the nature of our waiting, any answer will suffice. And so the waiting fades, and we content ourselves with eating and drinking, with having a husband or wife. But then, when we find ourselves disappointed, we ask ourselves with even greater awareness than before: “What is this lack a lack of, O heart, of which you are suddenly full?”
Advent means that Christ comes again to awaken us from our slumber, to answer this lack that never stops making itself felt. Therefore, in this time of Advent, we are invited to cry out: “Come, Lord Jesus!” We ask the Lord to give us a lack, an expectation equal to His coming. Because, even after His coming, we too can succumb and settle once again.
St. Paul, in the second reading, invited the Christians of Rome, who had all encountered Christ: “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.” Only if He awakens us from our torpor, from our sleep, can we free ourselves from all these distractions, to “put on,” as St. Paul says, “the Lord Jesus.”
Only if Christ reawakens in us the fullness of our desire for Him can we begin to savor His coming already within the waiting—a waiting that His coming inflames even more! How does Christ reawaken expectation in the Romans? Through St. Paul. First, God reawakened it through Isaiah, then Jesus, and then Paul. Who reawakens it in me, in you, today?
First Sunday of Advent - Year A
Notes from the homily by Fr. Julián Carrón November 30, 2025 (First Reading: Is 2:1-5; Psalm: 121 (122); Second Reading: Rom 13:11-14a; Gospel: Mt 24:37-44)
